025.431: The Dewey blog

IFLA 2005: Joan and Juli's picks

Joan and Juli both recently attended the World Library and Information Congress, a.k.a. the 71st General Conference and Council of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), held in Oslo, Norway, August 14-18, 2005. Hundreds of papers were presented at the conference: here's a note of some that Joan and Juli picked out as especially interesting or relevant for readers of the Dewey blog.

Some of the presentations were made by colleagues from LC and OCLC. John D. Byrum (Library of Congress, USA) suggested how the functionality of library catalogs may be improved by incorporating features commonly offered by online bookstores and web search engines. Glenn Patton (OCLC, USA) reported on the activities of the IFLA FRANAR Working Group in extending the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model to authority data; and Beacher Wiggins (Library of Congress, USA) summarized the results of a survey of the extent to which electronic resources are being included in European national bibliographies. Beacher's was a popular topic: other papers on related matters were presented by Christian Lupovici (Bibliothèque nationale de France), who described the BnF's experiments in the preservation and bibliographic control of electronic resources; Maja Žumer (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), who reported the results of an analysis of the uses and users of national bibliographies; and Unni Knutsen (Oslo University College, Norway), who provided an overview of the state of bibliographic control in the Nordic countries.

Access to multilingual information was a key theme of the conference. Marie Balikova (National Library of the Czech Republic) described a project whose goal is to provide multilingual subject access to the catalogs of seven national libraries in Eastern Europe. Magda Heiner-Freiling (Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany) and Patrice Landry (Swiss National Library) discussed the modifications that have been made to the presentation in the second level of the DDC to highlight topics of interest for the national bibliographies of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Natalia Kulygina (Russian State Library) explained how authority control is maintained in her library's multilingual catalog. Meanwhile, Jo-Anne Bélair (Université Laval, Canada), Françoise Bourdon, and Michel Mingam (both Bibliothèque nationale de France) provided the rationale for continuing to maintain two French indexing languages -- RVM in Canada and RAMEAU in France -- rather than just one; and Ole Henrik Magga (Saami University College, Norway) highlighted the importance of representing indigenous knowledge in knowledge organization systems.

One of Juli's special interests is the relationship of librarianship and knowledge management. Michael Koenig (Long Island University, USA) evaluated the opportunities presented for librarians by the maturation of knowledge management, and Sajjad Ur Rehman (Kuwait University) and Abdus Sattar Chaudhry (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) reported the results of a study of library-school directors' perceptions of education for knowledge management.

Do stupid things faster with more energy

Short of the medical establishment's confirming the health benefits of my beloved national dish (six pints of Stella and a chicken tikka masala), there is surely no more unexpected-yet-welcome news than the recent rediscovery that coffee is in fact exceedingly good for you. Such a timely announcement gives me the fortitude I need to finally throw off the cloak of shame, peel back the facade, and proudly reveal Dewey Manor as the den of iniquity it really is. All that guff about tea at four in the drawing room? Merely a smokescreen, a pathetic attempt to deny the simple fact that, quite frankly, we're all addicted to the hard stuff, even the Vicar. And not just because it tastes good and clears the head, but because the ritual of ordering coffee is such a celebration of correct citation order. Fancy an iced decaf triple grande skinny hazelnut latte? Get one of those facets out of order, honey, and you won't be welcome at our pricey pastry-parlor of Pacific-Northwest provenance again. The interdisciplinary DDC number for coffee is 641.3373 (under 641.3 Food, not 641.2 Beverages); 633.73 is for Coffee--agriculture; and works about coffeehouses go in 647.95 Eating and drinking places, under 647 Management of public households.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

As you'll have gathered from previous posts, we like our recreational arts here at Dewey Manor, so it should come as no surprise that we spent most of the weekend in rapt attention to the National Rock Paper Scissors Championship. Of course, most of our time off is usually taken up by rolling games of Classibabble ... you know, the Scrabble® variant where, instead of using letters to make words, you use numerals to make valid DDC numbers? (The Vicar won last week's game with a stunning double-triple bingo, 897.45529 -- that's 527 points for that one play alone.) But once again our minds began to wander in the direction of possible Dewey-blog competition fodder, and this week we're hoping you'll humor us by finding the shortest Dewey "pangrams" -- i.e., the shortest DDC numbers that use all ten digits. Maybe you're familiar with the typist's favorite pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet in a sentence that's only 35 letters long. I'm never quite sure why the shorter "The five boxing wizards jump quickly" didn't catch on instead; in any case, my favorite is the headline for the story of the despicable vandals of the Welsh valley who were thwarted by their discovery of a block of quartz with carvings already on it: "Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks." Can't get any shorter than that. So: are there any ten-digit DDC numbers out there that use every numeral once and only once? Be the first to let us know.

Lafof zobac (Ĉu vi parolas Dewey? 2.0, with added religious fervor)

Okay, we all know about the spelling reform and the metric reform and the library reform. You might be forgiven for thinking that one of the fin-de-siècle bandwagons that Melvil refrained from jumping upon was the artificial language movement. But he was all over that one too, funding a journal about Ro, the constructed language in which "bofoc" means red, and "bofod" means orange (with the prefix "bofo-" standing for color). And isn't there a sense in which the DDC itself can be understood as an artificial language: one that happens to be used for talking about the subjects of documents? It's also one that seems to have found somewhat more success -- in 138 countries worldwide -- than Ro ever did. So there weren't too many misunderstandings at the third annual Dewey Translators Meeting the other week. Everyone spoke ILD: the International Language of Dui.

Thirty-one librarians attended the August 16 meeting (held at Oslo University College in conjunction with IFLA's World Library and Information Congress), representing DDC translation projects in thirteen countries. Points of discussion included a general DDC update, a DDC research update, a demonstration of the German translation support software presented by Magda Heiner-Freiling (Die Deutsche Bibliothek) and Peter Werling (Pansoft), and brief reports on translations and other DDC-related activities from those present. But the main focus of debate was the treatment of options in 200 Religion, and opportunities for providing a more balanced representation of major religions at the top levels of the system. The attendees supported a move toward a new general option, to which existing provisions might be mapped in a one-to-one fashion, that would foster interoperability between standard and optional numbers and provide a useful browsing interface for all users. Such a new general option might also serve as a vehicle for studying a possible future framework for 200 Religion. The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) recently revised its Class 2 in a chronological/regional pattern. Dr. Ia McIlwaine, UDC editor in chief, and Joan S. Mitchell, DDC editor in chief, have agreed to undertake a joint study on a compatible top-level presentation and crosswalk between the two systems for the presentation of religion.

As part of the planning process, we'd like to find out more about who's using the current options in religion. It would make our day if you could complete this short questionnaire -- by September 26, 2005, please. And comments in direct response to this post would be excellent too! Rev. Foster -- if you're out there -- what do you make of all this?

Y'know, actually, it's 823.912

Bookstores don't use Dewey. Don't worry: we're over it. And anyway, if they did, there wouldn't be so many opportunities for guerrilla classification.* First there was that guy in San Francisco who went with his friends to Adobe Bookshop one night, and reclassified its entire stock by color. Not truly guerrillarrific, though, since the store knew what was going on, and they changed everything back after a few weeks anyway. But now things are getting serious, courtesy of the Ministry of Reshelving. The plan: to relocate, in bookstores worldwide, one thousand nine hundred and eighty four copies of George Orwell's 1984, from their currently "incorrect" location in the "Fiction" or "Literature" sections, to a "more suitable" location such as "History" or "True Crime." If you accept the Ministry's mission to "discreetly move" the books, you can download a "This book has been relocated by the Ministry of Reshelving" bookmark for insertion in any reclassified copy, and upload photographic evidence to Flickr. As the Ministry humbly points out, "this project is not a critique of bookstore culture, the state of the shelving industry, or even of pervasive government surveillance. It is merely an observation that 2 + 2 = 5, and 5 is no longer fiction." Righto. Meanwhile, performance art goes in 700; avant gaming in 790 (we think). And thanks to Alane and Laura for the simultaneous tip-offs.

* I'm quite pleased with that phrase, by the way: if you search for it on Google (with one or two "r"s), you don't get any results. So, once this page is indexed by Google, "guerrilla classification" will be a Googlewhack. Unless somebody else uses it before then, in which case ... Oh, never mind.

Eccles takes the cake

This one falls squarely in the category marked "You couldn't make it up." Bear in mind, if at all possible, that what you are about to read (which, with apologies to all fans of cheap sarcasm, we present without further comment) is not a lost Monty Python script, but a transcript of what really was said in the UK Parliament's House of Lords on June 9, 2005.

Lord Harris of Haringey asked Her Majesty's Government: Whether the time spent preparing the e-Government Unit's document Tomatoes are not the only fruit: A rough guide to taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies and the like, represents value for money.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, yes, the document was published in 2002 by the Office of the e-Envoy, at the request of technical users in government who were new to the subject. It was produced in-house at an estimated cost of less than £100.

Lord Harris of Haringey: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that information. I ask him to congratulate the civil servants concerned on the diligence and speed with which they must have produced 12,000 words and four charts on the subject of Tomatoes are not the only fruit, containing such gems of information as: "How long has it been for many of us since the primary meaning of the word 'mouse' has been 'a small furry animal that frightens elephants?'," or the information that carrots can be either salad or root vegetables. That will no doubt come in very helpful in promoting e-government. Can we also congratulate the authors of the Guide to meta-tagging with the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary, which gives another eight pages of valuable advice and information? It includes the information that the phrase "Common Agricultural Policy" may appear under the phrase "European Union" or under "Farming" but will mean the same under both. Given the diligence of the civil servants in the unit, can the Minister assure the House that the same energy and effectiveness is being applied to delivering information security throughout the public sector? ...

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, I shall of course pass on my noble friend's congratulations. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that civil servants are as we speak listening carefully to his kind congratulations and warm words. ... The document, although it has attracted a certain levity, is I am sure most useful to those who work in government IT services.

Earl Ferrers: My Lords, can the Minister not pass on congratulations to the civil servants on producing a document that is completely incomprehensible to a normal person and really does not make any sense at all? Why cannot they learn to write English?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, having looked at the document, which has a modest number of words, I disagree with the noble Earl. I believe that IT users in the business will probably find it very helpful and useful. Certainly, when I read it, I began to understand notions relating to taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies.

Lord Maclennan of Rogart: My Lords, although the use of what the Civil Service calls "controlled vocabulary" may operate as a disincentive to get online to the Government, can the Government say whether there has been a significant improvement in the access to e-government over the past two years? ...

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, there have been improvements, and I am sure that the e-Government Unit is aware of its role and responsibility in ensuring that these improvements continue. ...

Viscount Eccles: My Lords, is the Minister aware that if he were unfortunate enough to have cancer of the bladder, medical advice would be that he should eat no more tomatoes? Is that information on the website?

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, not that I am aware, no.

Lord Peyton of Yeovil: My Lords, I really wonder whether the noble Lord is aware of the extent to which he has attracted to himself this morning the wholehearted sympathy of the House at the appalling ordeal that he has had to go through in not giving a single answer to a question and really fluffing what he has said beyond the limits of comprehension.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Lord always makes generous remarks across the House, and I suppose that I have to be the beneficiary of those remarks on some occasions.

Newsflash: Librarians know about computers and stuff

Nice, prominent piece in the Washington Times yesterday about library schools in the DC area, specifically the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies, and Catholic University's School of Library and Information Science. Lots of the usual about librarians now being known as "information navigators," some even working "online in cyberspace." Personally, I was disappointed not to see any reference to the talented data choreographers or wisdom stylists among us, but in general we at Dewey Manor were excited to confirm that the DDC "continues to be taught because it is still used to arrange materials in schools." (Hmm: perhaps the author hasn't been into a local public library any time recently, or any of the academic and national libraries that use Dewey in 138 countries?) We were a little stunned, however, to read that, "Although most [librarians] are still women ... nearly all hold at least one master's degree, while some even hold doctorates." Egad! You mean ... they're letting women into grad school now? When did this happen? And those people who put the books back on the shelves -- they have advanced degrees? Whew, the world sure is a different place now. Different from how it was in 1905, that is. PS: Thanks, Winton, for the cutting!

Complete control

Yesterday was special. Clash fans commemorated Joe Strummer's birthday. Law fans celebrated Lawyer's Day. And presumably window-furnishings fans solemnly marked the anniversary of the first patent for the venetian blind (1841). But nobody partied harder than regular readers of the Dewey blog, who had been ticking the days off for weeks, eagerly awaiting the much-heralded release of August's quarterly update of WebDewey and Abridged WebDewey (WD/AWD). It's always the event of the season, of course, but on this particular occasion excitement had reached fever pitch, in anticipation of the new "Link to OPAC" enhancement, previewed here a month ago. To recap, this is the feature that lets you set your WD/AWD system preferences so that all you need to do to conduct a call-number search of your local OPAC is click on a button (labeled "OPAC") that appears in the WD/AWD record for your chosen DDC number. You don't have to leave the WD/AWD interface to initiate the search, and search results are displayed in a separate pop-up window. Thanks to everyone who emailed Eliza with suggestions of local OPACs to test the new feature on. We tested, and then we tested some more, and then we said "It is ready." So what are you waiting for?

Licensed to ill

Ah, Prague. The unspoiled beauty of Old Town Square. The vitality of young radicals discussing philosophy over chilled glasses at sidewalk tables. The sweet aroma of the pools of vomit freshly deposited on the street by British tourists eager to sample the delights of continental cafe society (and cheap beer). But now, in an audacious bid to bring European drinking culture to the UK -- and at the same time take the "war on drugs" to the next level -- licensing laws in England and Wales have been relaxed to allow for sales of alcohol around the clock. No longer will town centers nightly resemble battle zones, since everyone will be fighting ... sorry, "drinking responsibly" inside the pubs instead. Meanwhile, back at Dewey Manor -- where a stiff cup of PG Tips is about as wild as it gets, honest -- interdisciplinary works on the public control of alcoholic beverages would go in social problems and services at 363.41 Sale of alcoholic beverages. The numbers for works specifically taking a legal or a public-administration perspective are 344.0541 and 353.37, respectively. And the bachelor-party capital of Europe? T2--43712.

Invasion of the megafauna

Much like David James,* it seems, the US public aren't ready for the big game. Then again, who wouldn't face the prospect of a few lions and cheetahs prowling around in their back yard with a certain amount of trepidation? If the Pleistocene re-wilders get their way, though, we're all going to have to get used to sharing our ecosystem not just with a few big cats, but with assorted camels, elephants, and feral horses too. It would be a triple whammy, y'see, (a) boosting biodiversity in North America, (b) saving species endangered in Africa and Asia, and (c) creating jobs in ecotourism. Thing is [library school "humor" alert]: Would these animals count as ... how shall I put this ... documents? I'll leave that one to the antelope lovers, but at the same time give a shout out to Suzanne Briet, if only because I'm fairly sure David James and Suzanne Briet have never been linked so closely before. Interdisciplinary works on big game animals are classed in the DDC at 599.6 Ungulates; biodiversity of big game goes in economics, under biological resources at 333.9596. A bio of Madame Documentation? 025.0092. Calamity James: 796.334092.

* Goalkeeper for England's soccer team, whose lack of pre-match preparation had such a devastating effect on England's performance against Denmark last night.