[Sigia-l] Dui or PMS?

[Leonard Will]

In message <774cfb570608280424o5cf941aeyd169aa060b5a89c5 at mail.gmail.com> 
on Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Davezilla <davezilla at gmail.com> wrote
>On 8/28/06, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> So how do you do it? Does size also matter to you?
>>
>> <http://www.designobserver.com/archives/017288.html>
>
><rant> In addition to being an IA, I am an African priest (for real),
>and thus have always been disturbed by the religious handling of the
>DDC. All 700+ African religions are delgated to 299 (Other religions).
></rant>

Yes, many parts of DDC have an unbalanced allocation of notation, partly 
for historical reasons (subjects have developed since the basis of the 
classification was set up) and partly because it is designed to reflect 
the quantity of published material that needs to be subdivided into 
classes small enough to be scanned by a human. The amount of published 
material on African religions is likely to be significantly smaller than 
the amount on Christianity. There should be no implication of relative 
"value" or "importance". Things are changing all the time, of course, 
but so much material has already been classified that radical 
reorganisation is resisted by people who cannot re-classify a large 
backlog.

>I vote for subject, then size (from sheer physics on older bookshelves, 
>this makes a lot of sense)

That depends what you mean by "subject" - how specific are your 
subdivisions? As a practical compromise, many libraries group first by 
size (using just one or two groups: perhaps "standard" and "outsize", or 
"octavo", "quarto" and "folio") and then by subject within the group.

Of course everything depends on the size and scope of your collection, 
how you use it, the tools you have available for retrieving items by 
subject, and so on . . .

Leonard Will

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