LCC, Library classifications, and a lot of whining:-)/awg
Anders Gillner <awg@sunet.se> Sun, 06 December 1992 16:00 UTC
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Subject: LCC, Library classifications, and a lot of whining:-)/awg
Date: Sun, 06 Dec 92 15:29:04 +0100
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From: Anders Gillner <awg@sunet.se>
Hi all, This is my last posting to all the lists on this matter, so if You want to follow the discussion further on, please do so by connecting to the gopher-server at sunic: Name=Eurogopher mailinglist Type=1 Port=70 Path=m/eurogopher Host=sunic.sunet.se Ok, I finally got my hands on the complete LCC-list, so here goes: A. General Works B. Philosophy, Psychology, Religon C. Auxiliary Sciences of History D. History, General and Old World E-F. History, America (Where E is America, General, and F is the US) G. Geography, Anthropology, Recreation H. Social Sciences J. Political Science K. Law L. Education M. Music N. Fine Arts P. Language and Literature Q. Science R. Medicine S. Agriculture T. Tecnology U. Military Science V. Naval Science Z. Bibliography Ok, this list is AMERICAN, and I guess that somebody can dig out a list with the topic "European History" in it, sigh... But still, if we are going to use this list I think we ought to modernize it a little. Going the way that Billy said that people trod before me (making my own because everything else stinks), you find my suggestion at the bottom of this document. It`s (more or less) built on the LCC one. I`m trying to follow two simple rules: 1. The users should feel at home browsing through the list it shall follow some simple logic about how topics are interrelated. 2. It should, more or less,follow some existing classification sceme, so that we could use the same sub-topics. Whining on :-) This business is driving me crazy, and sometimes, in the middle of things, I wonder what type of people the librarians are ?:-)) In my mind some of these clusters don`t match. I know for instance that psychology was a subtopic under philosophy once, but in the 1990:s ? All human activities have something to do with each other, but do Geography, Antrophology and RECREATION, have more to do with each other than Social Sciences and Political Sciences ? Not speaking about Political Sciences and Law, (especially if you look at the sub- topics). If we use this in Europe, I don`t think that we should have a special subject called "American History", if we have, we have to have "European History" and "Pacific History", etc..etc.. Auxiliary Science is an odd thing, CT is Biography, and a note says: "For biography associated with a particular subject, see that subject." But a little further down you find "Biography of women", no biography of men to be seen.....The same box(Auxil....) also contains things like "Medals and medallions", "Diplomatics", and "Chivalry and Knighthood" this latest topic covering things like "tornaments,duels, orders and decorations". Seems like sociology to me...., but let`s face it; there are human activities that don`t let themselves classifie easily, that`s probably why there are subjects like "General Works" and "Auxil..." I showed the UNESCO list for one of the librarians working with the Swedish Union Catalogue, and he said(quote)"Where did they dig this out ? Somewhere in the 16:th century ?" (end of quote), and I agree. I really think that it`s worse than the LCC-list, and I have the same feeling about the OCLC-list, just even more so. The latter one could possibly be used as a cross-reference list for documents. End of whining :-) A rumor tells that some of the heavy publishers like Elsevier and McGraw-Hill are heading towards electronic publication, and doing it fast. I think that they saw that their market was threathend In what form this publishing is going to be done is not yet clear to me. So how do we do it, use an old fashioned library system, or try to get the net to adopt something more modern and globally acceptable, and who is going to design that one ? Naturally we have to build some search system, like the one that has been proposed by Thomas L. and Gerhard L. on top of whatever system we choose, but as Ton wrote, the system we need is not here yet. What is it that we really want ? Billy says that Reinhards Biology Subject Tree is not a subject tree at all, but a collection of biology resources, which probably is exactly what Reinhard, and his collegues want, because there is no guarantee that all the resources that a biologist want neccesarily would classify under biology in a library system. So: Why don`t we adopt a system where the subject maintainers collect the resources they want for their researchers etc. and let the information providers put a label on each document, an UDI and a library identifier, then we will be able to let the search systems of the future go out on the net an compile documents into f.ex QA76. regards, and a very, Merry Christmas to all of you, and thanks for the year that has passed from: /awg (who feels himself wanting to go into immediate hibernation, waking up sometime next year:-)) --------------------------------------- MY OWN LIST: General Works Philosophy Psychology Religon Auxiliary Sciences of History History Geography Anthropology Social Sciences Political Science Law Education Music Fine Arts Language and Literature Science Medicine Agriculture Technology Military Science Naval Science Library Science ------------------------------
- LCC, Library classifications, and a lot of whinin… Anders Gillner
- Re: LCC, Library classifications, and a lot of wh… Alan Emtage