025.431: The Dewey blog

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.

The New Editorial Support System: Application and Development Process

When I blogged the data side of our new Editorial Support System (ESS) a couple of months ago, I promised to follow up with blog entries on the ESS from the perspective of the application and the development process.  Funny thing, but since then, we’ve been heavily engaged in work to help get the ESS out the door (some of which is referred to below).   So this blog entry ends up being two entries rolled into one.

Short and sweet on the application side:  The editorial team has collectively decided that the ESS application should be classed in 025.4310285574 (built with 025.431 Dewey Decimal Classification, plus notation 0285 Computer applications from Table 1, plus notation 574 from 005.74, following instructions at T1—0285, to indicate that the ESS operates as a database management system).

Moving on then to the development process of the ESS:  The process that has governed the overall work has been agile software development, which matches a Relative Index term at 005.1 Programming; the class-here note at 005.1 includes software engineering.

The subclasses of 005.1 enumerate the most significant specific tasks involved in the application development process.  For example, 005.1068 Computer programming—Management (built with 005.1 Programming, plus notation 068 Management from Table 1) is the appropriate class number for the work done by the project manager to keep the flow of development tasks moving toward system launch. 

A major component of software development is the analysis of user requirements and the design of software to address user needs.  These aspects of the software development process are classed in 005.12 Software systems analysis and design, where the class-here note specifically indicates that “analysis of a user's problem preparatory to developing a software system to solve it” (i.e., user requirements) should be classed there.

Some standard subdivision concepts have been displaced, both because they have specific meanings in the context of software development and to achieve an appropriate order under 005.1.  For example, while one set of developers built the application and another set worked with the database, the editors tried to keep up with testing the various pieces (e.g., searching/browsing, spellcheck, validation, reports) as they emerged; our testing is classed in 005.14 Verification, testing, measurement, debugging, with testing and measurement having been displaced from 005.10287.

With the number of persons involved in the project, various types of communication were needed to keep everyone informed, including, for example, email (004.692 Electronic mail), videoconferences (384.556 Controlled transmission television), Sharepoint (a collaboration tool that we used primarily for sharing documents and links), and JIRA (an issue tracking system).  (For now, the latter two subjects would be classed in 006.78 Multimedia system programs, but we will need to revisit 006.7 before the whole increasingly-web-based world is classed there.)  In addition, documentation in the form of an online help component within the application will continue to keep users of the system informed; preparation of this component is classed in 005.15 Preparation of program documentation, where development of online help is mentioned in the including note.

This blog entry is dedicated (with heartfelt thanks) to the many persons who have worked diligently with us for well over a year to develop the new ESS.

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.