Week 11:  Cataloging, Part I

I entered this week's reading reading with a medium to strong bias against the Dewey Decimal System.  From what I could see in my library, the number assigned to a particular book often meant that it would be separated from like topics, often in offensive ways.  Native American religions were sometimes in religions, sometimes in myths and sometimes in fairy tales.  Ancient civilizations have their own place, separate from their modern counterpart, unless they are Asian in which case they are lumped together. Granted, many of our non-fiction books are so old that I could blame previous librarians for their placement--many of the books don't have the DDS number on the title leaf and they certainly didn't have an OPAC to suggest a number for them. But even so, I find that too often books on a certain topic are scattered throughout several categories.  This makes browsing hard and looking up books by the call number confusing.  No wonder our nonfiction barely moves! 

Is there a better way? I learned the basics of the DDS as a kid and the logical structure always appealed to me. Even now, I like the logical nesting structure and finding the place for a book feels like finding where a jigsaw puzzle piece goes.  But if the goal is to group like items together to make them easier to find, I think it needs work. I am intrigued by the METIS system, but a it doesn't seem to have caught on widely and I think it is too basic for high school.  The bookstore model also shows promise, but I rethought that after reading a scholarly article which notes that bookstores are different from libraries because their goal is to make money, not spread information.  So I guess I've come back around to Dewey-Lite!

Which brings me to using the catalog to find books. I was quite interested in the subject heading v. keywords because when I students comes to me and tells me they are looking for a books about "X", I show them how to do a search in Destiny (which, I'm sorry to say, most do not know how to do).  I tell them to do the keyword search not the subject heading because it is more likely to come up with hits, which they can then narrow down.  For example, students in one of our ELA classes do research about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression before reading Of Mice and Men.  If they do a subject search for "dust bowl" they get no hits, but a key word search turns up one item.  Given that there are certainly other books that contain at least some information about the Dust Bowl, I also see the limits of relying on the surrogate record. If I happen to know of a book that I should be in there and isn't, I can go in and add "Dust Bowl" to the record.  I'm going to try that and see what happens!