025.431: The Dewey blog

Dewey at AASL 2009

Are you going to the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) 14th National Conference in Charlotte November 5-8?  If yes, please join us for a free breakfast and chat about Dewey in school libraries at the Dewey Breakfast/Update on Saturday, November 7, 7:00–8:30 a.m., in the Magnolia Room at the Courtyard by Marriott, Charlotte City Center, 237 S. Tryon Street.

The agenda includes a lively discussion about “what does it mean to use Dewey?” plus a review of the latest proposals for changes to the 370 Education schedule.  We have discussed possible changes to 370 Education at the last two AASL conferences; at this year’s meeting, we’ll review proposals for updates to specific subjects in primary education and specific levels of education.  We’ve incorporated suggestions from AASL members and other groups in the latest version of the 370 Education and are anxious for feedback from school librarians before finalizing the content for inclusion in the print version of DDC 23.  The meeting will also include a general Dewey update and open discussion period—bring those burning Dewey questions and suggestions!

Please register here by November 2.  See you in Charlotte!

Dewey Translators Meeting at IFLA 2009

Forty-five librarians from seventeen countries attended the Dewey Translators Meeting at the World Library and Information Congress (75^th IFLA General Conference and Council) in Milan on August 25. We started the Dewey Translators Meeting in 2003 at IFLA in Berlin as a forum to discuss issues of interest to DDC translation teams (hence the name), but the focus of the meeting has broadened over the years to embrace topics of interest to a wide range of attendees beyond the core group of translation partners.

The first speaker at this year’s meeting, Marie Baliková (Czech National Library), discussed a UDC/DDC crosswalk developed by the Czech National Library for the purpose of collection assessment. The Czech National Library uses the UDC as its primary knowledge organization tool, but makes use of a UDC/DDC crosswalk to enable use of a DDC-based tool for collection assessment. Marie also touched more general issues in knowledge organization—challenges in the creation of crosswalks, identification of weaknesses in classification systems, and problems in the presentation of captions to end users.

Julianne Beall discussed the use of Dewey in the World Digital Library (WDL) project with a focus on the draft guidelines for classifying photographs for the project. We developed the guidelines in consultation with Dewey Section classifiers involved in classifying photographs for WDL. Diane Vizine-Goetz presented an update on two OCLC Office of Research initiatives, Classify, a prototype web service designed to support the assignment of classification numbers, and WorldCat work pages, a project to create rich descriptions from catalog data resulting in a page for every work. Sample WorldCat work pages are available at http://frbr.oclc.org/research/pages/000021759.html. Finally, I presented a brief update on the some changes in the representation of the DDC in MARC 21 formats, design plans for WebDewey 2.0, and the launch of DDC linked data.

We were fortunate to have the heads of all four European DDC Users’ Group (EDUG) working groups in attendance at the Dewey Translators Meeting. Yvonne Jahns (DNB) discussed the work of the EDUG 340 Law Working Group, which has been considering European Union law, theory of sources of law, juristic acts, criminal courts, criminal procedure, and legal professionals. A preliminary report is expected before the end of September, and Yvonne will attend EPC Meeting 132 in November 2009 to discuss the report. Anne-Céline Lambotte (Université de la Méditerranée) reported on the work the EDUG 370 Education Working Group has done on levels of education and subjects in primary education. The 340 and 370 working groups had enough members present in Florence the week before at “Looking at the Past and Preparing for the Future,” an IFLA satellite meeting held August 20-21, to hold a meeting on August 20. Magdalena Svanberg (National Library of Sweden) discussed the EDUG 930 Archaeology Working Group’s concerns about the interdisciplinary provisions for archaeology at 930.1, within 930 History of ancient world to ca. 499. Archaeology of a place after 499 or a place not provided for in T2—3 The ancient world is classed with the history of the place in 940-990 General history of modern world. Gordon Dunsire (University of Strathclyde) reported on the recommendation of the EDUG Technical Issues Working Group that the Dewey editorial team publish the Dewey URI specification. The Dewey URI specification is one of the underpinnings of the recently launched dewey.info service—we plan to issue a discussion paper shortly based on the version of the specification presented at EPC Meeting 131. In the open reporting session, Sohair Wastawy (Bibliotecha Alexandrina) updated the group on the progress of the Arabic translation. We are working together toward the goal of publishing the Arabic translation of DDC 23 near simultaneously with the publication of the English-language edition. By the way, the 2010 EDUG meeting will be held at Bibliotecha Alexandrina in April 2010.

NASKO 2009

Back in June I enjoyed meeting with colleagues at the 2009 North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization, the biennial meeting of the International Society for Knowledge Organization–Chapter for Canada and the United States, held at Syracuse University.   (Just to be clear:  NASKO refers only to the biennial meeting, while ISKO–C/US [unfortunately, we can all figure out how that acronym is going to end up being pronounced!] refers to the ISKO chapter.)

The School of Information Studies at Syracuse hosted the symposium in splendid style.  In welcoming us, Dean Liz Liddy noted that NASKO was the first conference to be held in their newly renovated building and expressed how appropriate it was that the first meeting there should be one dedicated to knowledge organization.  “Classification is really the core of every endeavor; I value your work.”  It was gratifying to be appreciated for what we collectively do.

The theme for the symposium, the first official meeting of the chapter, was Pioneering North American Contributions to Knowledge Organization.  The goal of the symposium was to serve as an “occasion . . . to take stock of our past in light of the present and with an eye to how this living heritage might be leveraged for the future.”

Several of the papers (all of which are available on dLIST) addressed themes relevant to our work with the DDC.  Through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between language and discourse, Grant Campbell addressed the tension between global and local perspectives in knowledge organization:  how can our systems be interoperable, which would enable access to information resources on a global level, but still preserve that which is specific to the cultures and communities they serve?  Linda Hill presented a paper on geocoding in KO, a topic that editor Michael Panzer has also been exploring of late.  One of two papers presented by Tom Dousa examined evolutionary order in the theories and classificatory practices of Ernest Cushing Richardson and Charles Ammi Cutter, contemporaries of Melvil Dewey.

Lastly, I presented a paper on the notational system that Melvil Dewey devised for the DDC.  (I always love it when Dewey gets the last word!)  Just to whet your appetite, I repeat here the paper’s abstract:  “Historically, the notational system of the Dewey Decimal Classification provided for non-institution-specific, relative location shelf arrangements, thus substantially reducing bibliographic classification effort. Today its decimal notation continues to provide the classification scheme with flexible granularity, is hospitable to expansion, expresses relationships, interfaces well with modern retrieval systems, and is internationally understood.”

Dewey Translators Meeting at IFLA 2009

OCLC will host the annual Dewey Translators Meeting in conjunction with the World Library and Information Congress (75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly) on Tuesday, 25 August, 16:00-18:00, Orange 3 Meeting Room, Milano Convention Centre.  The agenda includes presentations on the UDC/DDC crosswalk developed by the Czech National Library for the purpose of collection assessment, the classification of photographs in the World Digital Library Project, Dewey research activities, and changes in the formats for the representation and distribution of the DDC.  Please register here if you wish to attend the meeting.

Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA Annual 2009: Presentations

The presentations from the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Annual Conference are now available on the Dewey web site at http://www.oclc.org/dewey/news/conferences/default.htm. 

ALA Awards

One of the highlights of the ALA Annual Conference is the recognition of important contributions to our profession.  On Monday, I had the pleasure of presenting the John Ames Humphry / OCLC / Forest Press Award to Pat Oyler (associate dean and professor at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science) for her contributions to international librarianship.  Pat received this award for her significant contributions to library development in Vietnam, including cataloging standards, modern services, new technology application, and training and continuing education of librarians.  Juli Beall and I have had the privilege of traveling with Pat to Vietnam on several occasions in support of her efforts, and Pat was instrumental in the development and publication of the Vietnamese translation of the DDC.

Yesterday, I had the honor of presenting the Melvil Dewey Medal to Jim Neal (vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University).  Jim’s award citation reads in part:

In recognition of: his long and distinguished career as a director of three of America's most distinguished academic libraries; his role in effectively advocating for the interests of libraries in relation to intellectual property legislation and treaties at both the national and international levels . . .; his longstanding role in promoting changes in scholarly communication . . .; his vision and leadership in helping transform the roles, effectiveness, reach, and reputation of American's library organizations . . .; his steady, future-oriented promotion of an expansive and vital role for libraries through countless publications and speeches throughout the world; . . .

I also attended the presentation of the Margaret Mann Citation to Fran Miksa (emeritus professor, University of Texas School of Information).  The Margaret Mann Citation recognizes outstanding professional achievement in cataloging or classification.  One only needs to peruse the titles in Fran’s list of publications to see the key figures and topics he has tackled with vigorous scholarship over the years—Cutter, Dewey, Harris, Ranganathan, subject cataloging, classification in general, LCC and DDC, reference, LIS education, research libraries, and digital libraries.  There are two books in our field that I re-read on a regular basis because of their intellectual freshness and ability to prompt new insights—one is Patrick Wilson’s Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control, and the other is Fran Miksa’s The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-modern Library.  In the latter, Fran casts a critical historian’s eye on the Dewey Decimal Classification, library classification in general, the library as “public space” vs. “personal space,” and post-modernism (all in ninety-nine pages!).  I remember being mesmerized in the audience at Fran’s July 1996 lecture on which the book is based, and his thoughts continue to provoke me thirteen years later.

Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA Annual 2009

Please join us for the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Annual Conference on Saturday, July 11, 7:00–8:20 a.m., Chicago Hilton, Lake Michigan Room. The program will feature a presentation on planned functionality in WebDewey 2.0 (with time for input from attendees), plus three brief presentations in a session entitled “What does it mean to ‘use Dewey’?”   In the latter, we’ll be discussing uses of the new 083 and 085 fields in the MARC Bibliographic format (both fields are slated to be introduced in WorldCat in August 2009), the use of a DDC-driven representation in seven languages to provide access to digital resources in the World Digital Library, and a multilingual DDC linked data prototype service.  

For those of you who attended my talk at the Texas Library Association Conference in April 2009 by the same name as the upcoming session, we’ll be showing new content at the Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA. (By the way, Renee Patzer of Topeka and Shawnee County [KS] Public Library also participated in the same TLA program [Looking beyond Shelf Location: The Benefits of the Dewey Decimal Classification System in Libraries], and demonstrated a great use of the DDC to build “Dewey neighborhoods” in her library—her presentation and supporting materials are here.)

If you haven’t done so already, please register for the Dewey Breakfast/Update here.  See you next week in Chicago.

My Excellent Scandinavian Adventure

I spent the last week of January and the first week of February in Norway and Sweden.  The purpose of my trip was threefold:

Work on the mixed translation project with colleagues from the National Library of Norway and the National Library of Sweden (I’ve blogged about our mixed translation work previously—see our presentation from ISKO 2008)

Speak at Kunnskapsorganisasjonsdagene 2009 in Oslo, followed by a meeting with the Norwegian Classification Committee (NKKI)

Speak at a Dewey—let’s do it! in Stockholm, followed by a day of meetings with catalogers, subject experts, and members of the Libris department at the National Library of Sweden

I spent over a week in Oslo, most of it working on the mixed translation project at the National Library of Norway.  Ingebjørg Rype, Karen Nisja Domaas, and I worked on developing a mixed Norwegian-English version of 006 and 616-616.1 (back in DC, my colleague Rebecca Green performed magic on the mixed translation files each evening to transform the English-language instructions into their Norwegian counterparts for Dewey records in Norwegian).  Magdalena Svanberg (National Library of Sweden) joined us in Oslo at the midpoint of my visit to continue work on the mixed translation, and to discuss future project directions.  Inger Johanne Christiansen gave me a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour of the National Library of Norway (a highpoint of which was the chance to look at some Ibsen manuscripts that happened to be out for an Ibsen scholar’s visit later in the day).  On February 3, Magdalena, Ingebjørg, and I gave presentations at Kunnskapsorganisasjonsdagene 2009.  Later that day, we met with NKKI members to discuss the needs of Norwegian librarians in the design of the next Norwegian translation.  We also discussed the treatment of Nordkalotten (the area north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia). On the following day, Magdalena and Ingebjørg participated in a Dewey workshop sponsored by the National Library of Norway, NKKI, and JBI (the three of us used a break in the workshop to squeeze in a final meeting on the mixed translation research project). 

After the workshop in Oslo ended, Magdalena and I flew to Stockholm for a whirlwind two days of meetings.  The first was occupied by a full-day seminar on Dewey (the aforementioned “Dewey—let’s do it!”).  On the day following the seminar, I met with catalogers and subject experts at the National Library of Sweden to discuss use of the DDC in general, mappings between Svenska ämnesord (SAO) and Dewey, and the addition of Dewey numbers to SAO records.  We also managed to have two side discussions about classification of visual materials and proposed changes to the 780 Music schedule. (After my return home, I shared draft documents on both topics with our Swedish colleagues, and we have already received back preliminary reactions to the proposed changes in 780 Music [we will be posting a discussion paper on 780 Music for public comment shortly].)  I also briefed members of the Libris department on our work on MARC, RDF/SKOS, and URI representations of DDC data, plus a prototype DDC history-of-concepts web service.

During the course of my trip, the National Library of Norway made a decision to proceed with a web version of a Norwegian translation of the DDC, and the administration of the National Library of Sweden awarded preliminary funding to a group headed by Magdalena Svanberg to launch work on the Swedish translation of the DDC in September 2009.  Also, three more Swedish university libraries (Göteborg, Linköping, and Gävle) announced that they would make the switch to the DDC.

My colleague Lorcan Dempsey often writes about the need to make our data work harder.  The underlying DDC data files (including the set of interoperable translations), the mappings between Dewey and other terminology resources, and the large body of content categorized by Dewey available in WorldCat and elsewhere are incredible resources in the networked information environment.  We are focused right now on a number of efforts to make the DDC data available in web-friendly formats for human and machine interaction.  The challenge remains to find ways to make our DDC data work harder.

Dewey Breakfast (or, the First Meal of the Day at ALA Midwinter)

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]

Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA Midwinter

Please join us for the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Midwinter Meeting on Saturday, January 24, 7:00–8:20 a.m., Sheraton Denver Downtown, Denver. The program will feature a research update and a preview of a history-of-concepts prototype Dewey web service.  The editorial team will present proposed new developments for musical traditions, meals, and language variations for comment by breakfast attendees.  There will also be an open question/answer period.  If you haven’t already done so, please register for the Dewey Breakfast/Update here.