It goes without saying that quite often when you tell someone (who is not in the profession) you are a librarian (or whatever politically correct term you prefer), the first thing to come out of the other persons mouth is something like, “So what’s the Dewey Decimal “System” all about,” or “I remember Dewey Decimal from when I was in school.”

It’s often an ugh, not again (this is the fifth time I’ve heard this in the past week) moment.

However, what about challenging these people to not just say “Dewey” but actually learn something about it? It’s likely that the people who would want to learn more are rare but with the increasing amount of talk about the organization of information, who knows, you might find a few who actually want some knowledge.

If this is the case, here are a few excellent documents that provide and overview directly from Forest Press:

+ Intro to Dewey Decimal Classification (22 pages; PDF)

+ The Dewey Decimal Classification Vocabulary (9 pages; PDF)

+ New Features in Dewey (20 pages; PDF)
We doubt you’re going to find a non-professional to review this but (if you are lucky) it illustrates that the DDC changes over time.

So, at your next family event when some relative pulls out the, “I remember Dewey” line, direct them to these pages. If you’re really ready for a challenge, include these docs along with your next party invitation. ResourceShelf is not responsible if no one shows and you are left alone with an all-purpose cheese tray and a few bottles of wine. Have fun! We will save LCC and LCSH for the next gathering.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 1:17 am and is filed under Cataloging and Metadata, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.