LCC, Library classifications, and a lot of whining:-)/awg

[Anders Gillner <[e-mail]>]

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
------------------------------