On Saturday, January 24, at ALA Midwinter in Denver, we held our regular Dewey Breakfast/Update. Diane Vizine-Goetz presented a research update. Members of the editorial team presented outlines of proposed changes to DDC: “Language variations” by Julianne Beall, “Rethinking meals” by Giles Martin, and “780 Music” by Michael Panzer. Michael also previewed a history-of-concepts prototype Dewey web service in a presentation called “More than Lists of Changes: Tracing the history of DDC concepts.”
Julianne Beall’s presentation focused on geographic language variations—dialects, pidgins, creoles, and geographically limited slang. It described a proposal to drop current special provisions for mother countries and other major countries in 420–490 Specific languages in favor of straight subarrangement by area notation from Table 2. It pointed out that the current special provisions often fail to provide a good number for comprehensive works on language variations in the mother country. See the Dewey blog entry “Language variations around the world” for additional information and a link to the full proposal.
My presentation on meals outlined a proposed recasting of 641.52-641.54 Cooking specific meals to make the development more hospitable to meals from different cultures and to update the development.
Michael Panzer's 780 Music presentation noted three particular difficulties with the overall classification of music: the citation order is complex; the distinction between folk music and popular music is not universal; and the evolution of music styles is far from clean. Several strategies have been proposed for adoption to handle these difficulties: the class-with-the-last policy should be reinforced throughout the 780s; built number entries for popular music songs should be added; a clearer characterization of folk music should be given; and the schedule should be kept fairly shallow, but indexed more deeply.
[Links corrected March 2nd 2009]
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