025.431: The Dewey blog

Dewey Teaser: Part Deux

Thanks to our correspondent who goes by the mysterious sobriquet of "Make mine a double" -- to what could Sir or Madam possibly be referring? -- you might have gathered that last week's fine quotation comes from the mouth of the character Catherine in David Auburn's 2001 play, Proof. John Madden's movie adaptation, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine, has just opened in the US ... Anyone know if the reference to Dewey made it to the big screen?

Onward to this week's competition (for which, thanks Jeff!). Author and title please ...

Dewey took Manila
and soon after invented the decimal system
that keeps libraries from collapsing even unto this day.
A lot of mothers immediately started naming their male offspring "Dewey,"
which made him queasy. He was already having second thoughts about imperialism.
In his dreams he saw library books with milky numbers
on their spines floating in Manila Bay.

Weird. Or what

Team Dewey sent a delegation to the zoo last week. Not just any old zoo -- the US National Zoological Park, no less. Our brief: Check out the craziness at the Invertebrate Exhibit. There's some serious oddness in there, and no mistake. For some reason we missed the giant millipede (595.66 Diplopoda) -- which was unfortunate -- and the giant octopus (594.56 Octopoda) -- which was reprehensible -- but in any case I don't think any of us was quite prepared for the spiny lobster (595.384 Macrura), for instance, let alone those anemones (593.6 Anthozoa). The zoo had already raised the bar for us by showing off its dragon (597.95968 Varanus komodoensis) just outside the invertebrate house, so understandably we were half expecting to turn the corner and find the Loch Ness monster (001.944 Monsters and related phenomena) enjoying a sandwich. No such luck, but if you're on the trail of aquatic monster fun -- and, let's face it, who isn't? -- surely the next step is for the zoo to acquire a giant squid (594.58 Decapoda). Drawing on my own vast and expert knowledge of -- what do they call it? oh yes -- biology, I would have put Nessie and the giant squid together in the box marked "Mythical," but it turns out the giant squid exists, and there's photographic evidence to prove it, and so strictly speaking it's merely "Legendary." And 26 feet long. Wild.

Archive fever

For those of you (e.g., my wife and child) who might be wondering why the blog editor hasn't been frequenting his usual haunts (e.g., St*rb*cks, home) so much these last couple of weeks, it's because I've been holed up in Dewey Manor's attic, a.k.a. Dewey heaven. Occasionally the butler will bring me a plate of shortbread and I'll dictate the day's blog entry, but otherwise I've been diving pretty much continuously in the dumpster where we throw ... excuse me, where we lovingly and carefully arrange all the documents discussed by the Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee, together with the minutes of the committee meetings and other related records. The collection dates back to EPC Meeting no. 1 on December 16, 1937 -- the year before Dorkas Fellows died and Constantin Mazney was appointed as the new editor of bumper DDC Edition 14. (For earlier materials, historians would need to check Melvil's own papers, which are held at Columbia University in New York.) As you might imagine, these archives are a treasure trove of Deweyana. So, on the pretext of researching an upcoming EPC exhibit on 301–307 Sociology and anthropology, I've decided to read the lot. I'm up to 1939. But now I'm worried I might have blown my cover ...

Dedication's what you need

Which copyrighted book holds the world record for having sold the most copies? Guinness World Records, of course. The 2006 edition has just been published, and includes reports of such outlandish feats as the most beer glasses being balanced on someone's chin (75 in New York, NY, on April 26, 2001) -- as well as descriptions of more mundane, everyday events such as the most people in one location wearing Groucho Marx glasses, nose, and moustache (1,437 in New South Wales, Australia, on June 4, 2005). Apparently something called the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world; but one record-breaking artifact that unaccountably isn't included in GWR is the most widely-used library classification system. Of all the planets, Earth currently holds the record for most internationally recognized sovereign states (192), and the DDC is used in 138 of them. Not bad, huh? As a book of miscellaneous facts originally written in English, Guinness World Records is classed under General encyclopedic works, at 032.02.

Isaac and Melvil: The truth

A former student at the library school at UCLA (take a bow, Jenne!) once went on JEOPARDY! (America's Favorite Quiz Show®, no less) and nearly* won by "correctly" providing the question to the answer "The only author ever to have published books in all ten main classes of the Dewey Decimal System." Quite a feat for Isaac Asimov -- if it were true. Sadly, though, it looks like he didn't get around to writing any books that have been classified in the 100s (Philosophy & psychology). Our party-pooping source? This fine list of Frequently Asked Questions. But there's a twist that the Asimov FAQ doesn't mention. There is one record in WorldCat that lists Isaac Asimov as a main personal-name entry and that gives a DDC number in the 100s. But the work in question is a video, not a book. Humanism: Making bigger circles was produced by the American Humanist Association in the 1980s, and features "Dr. Isaac Asimov discuss[ing] humanism in all its aspects -- as a philosophy, as a religion, and its effects on politics." It's classed at 144 Humanism and related systems and doctrines.  (Thanks to Thom and Diane at OCLC for help with the WorldCat searches!)

* The buzzer went before she got to write the "v" at the end of "Asimov."

"Is it cheating if I use Google?" *

It's Friday again, and, from this week onward, that means it's competition time here at the Dewey blog. The rules, as ever, are straightforward: simply identify the source of the following literary quotation, and tell us. If correct, you'll immediately be inducted into the Dewey Hall of Fame! So, without further ado, here's Dewey Teaser Numero Uno (supplied by Winton):

"I tried to keep him happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn't reading: he believed aliens were sending him messages through the Dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code."

* Well, that's up to you and your personal honor code. But if you're an OCLC or LC employee and you even think of entering this contest, may woe betide you for the duration of your coffee break ...

Classy comic character

Just when you were thinking all was quiet on the graphic novel front, along comes Rex Libris, "guardian of knowledge, defender of the Dewey Decimal System and the best hope for the future of civilization." He's also head librarian at Middleton Public Library. MARVEL at his super-thick, bottle glasses! QUAKE in anticipation of his robust methods of dealing with late-fee refuseniks! RUMINATE on the implications of classing Rex's story in 741.5 Cartoons, caricatures, comics, graphic novels, fotonovelas! Meanwhile, back at the Manor, we can report that members of the Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) are now in possession of a draft schedule for graphic novels that is similar to the draft approved by EPC for testing in 2004. Also sent to EPC was a bumper package of comments received since that earlier draft was circulated, including several from the Dewey blog. One issue on which the editors have not yet made a recommendation to EPC is where to class works on how to write for comics, graphic novels, etc., but this and all other comic-book conundrums will be the subject of in-depth discussion at the EPC meeting coming up October 12-14, 2005.

Bigger. Better. Breakfastier

Going to the AASL Conference in Pittsburgh? The American Amateur Soccer League is a community-based, competitive travel soccer league serving over forty communities in northern Ohi ... No, wait ... Hmm, that's the wrong AASL. Agricultural Analytical Services Laboratory? No, still not right. Association of Architecture School Librarians? Close ... We mean the American Association of School Librarians, of course, and we'd love you to join Joan and Libbie for the Dewey Breakfast/Update on Friday, October 7, at the Westin Convention Center Hotel, Fayette Room, 7:00 - 8:20 a.m. Topics will include Dewey product news, the Dewey multilingual browser, options in religion, and the new proposed development for graphic novels. We'll also be discussing links between DDC categories and K-12 curriculum topics. If we've succeeded in whetting your appetite for this lipsmacking smorgasbord of Deweyana, RSVP to dewey@oclc.org by September 30, 2005, with your name, title, and full contact information. Team Dewey will see you there!

Ingeniouser and ingeniouser

Roy Tennant, user services architect at the California Digital Library, was the speaker here at the Library of Congress last Thursday. In his talk on "Life beyond MARC: The case for revolutionary change in library systems and services," Roy treated his large audience to a series of demonstrations of innovative catalog interfaces that in many cases owe more to the examples set by Google and Amazon than to traditional OPAC design. Roy's presentation provoked much discussion, and one of the questions raised (take a bow, Winton!) was about the extent to which current resource discovery systems are taking advantage of classification data, such as the DDC numbers that are assigned to works cataloged by libraries worldwide. As well as highlighting OCLC's FirstSearch and Curiouser, Roy had shown us RLG's RedLightGreen service, which automatically divides the results of any search into smaller groups of records that share the same LC subject heading, author, or language; could a similar approach be taken so that results are clustered by DDC number? Such a feature would be especially beneficial to the searcher since the clusters themselves could be arranged and browsed hierarchically rather than simply alphabetically. In fact, this is precisely the thinking behind OCLC's DeweyBrowser, which we pointed to a few weeks ago. Thom Hickey of OCLC's Office of Research took up Roy's theme in a recent blog entry -- "Why our catalogs don't work" -- and advocates further Amazonization as the key to satisfying library users' needs. Will the process of Amazonization involve the exploitation of DDC numbers? Can readers point to other examples of library search systems that use classification data in new and interesting ways?

Options in 200 Religion -- last call for comments

Here's the final reminder, everyone ... The deadline for completing our short questionnaire on the options at 290 Other religions is September 26, 2005. As we've said before, we're very keen to find out who's using these options and how. If you use any of the five options to give preferred treatment or shorter numbers to a specific religion, then please take a minute to let us know via the questionnaire. Thank you!