Something that stood out from my reading in Hoffman was the subjectivity of cataloging. “Just like no two catalogers will necessarily choose the same subject headings, no two catalogers will necessarily choose the same classification number” (2019, p. 169).
One example was The Tao of Pooh, cataloged at 828.91209, English literature, according to its Cataloging-in-Publication data (Kammer, n.d., slide 10), but also at 299.514 for Taoism (Kammer, n.d., slide 11).
And sometimes it might be necessary to change a classification to aid in an item’s “discovery.” There was a book about “dog detectives” in my school library, shelved under a Dewey classification related to the police. No one ever checked the book out. But as soon as I re-cataloged and reshelved the book under the Dewey number for dogs, readers began to discover it.
Finally, to support the importance of classification systems for libraries, I like this observation: that classification “will always be a relevant process;” that as an “essential tool of ordering to simplify and understanding phenomenon,” classification “will never outlive its utility” (Krishnamurthy, Satija, & Martínez-Ávila, 2023, p. 228).
References:
Hoffman, G. L. (2019). Organizing library collections: Theory and practice. Rowman & Littlefield.
Kammer, J. (n.d.) Classification systems in libraries [Slide presentation]. University of Central Missouri, LIS 5700.
Krishnamurthy, M., Satija, M. P., & Martínez-Ávila, D. (2023). Classification of Classifications: Species of Library Classifications. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 61(2), 228-248. https://www-tandfonline-com.cyrano.ucmo.edu/doi/full/10.1080/01639374.2023.2209068
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