Last week I attended the annual symposium of the New York chapter of the Association of College & Research Libraries. The theme of the 2018 ACRL/NY Symposium was "Libraries in Direct Action," with presentations focused on how academic and research libraries have taken action to uphold core values of librarianship, including social responsibility, education, democracy, and intellectual freedom.
I was especially interested in attending to hear a presentation relating to the DDC: "Wrestling with Dewey: Reclassifying Books on People of Color, Women, Immigrants, and LGBTQ for Greater Visibility." The presentation consisted of a panel of people from Bard High School Early College Queens, an academically rigorous public high school which gives students a chance to earn an Associate of Arts degree along with their high school diploma. The librarian, Jess deCourcy Hinds, led a panel discussing the local adaptations that she and the library interns had made to their library. Bard students and library interns Rachelle Monteau, Layla Ralekhetho, and Khadij Tandja presented on the work they had done in a semester-long project of an in-depth examination of the classification of books about African-American, Chicano, immigrant, queer, and women's history.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that their presentation on Dewey was the hit of the symposium! The audience was impressed by the students' engagement with the issues involved in classification. Each student discussed books and their critique of the class catalogers had assigned them. For example, Rachelle discussed works on civil rights movements of the twentieth century, asking "Why is activism not part of history?" She and the other students argued that many works that had been assigned numbers in 323 Civil and political rights should be moved to 973 History of the United States. Ultimately I think this particular reclassification would lead to an overburdened 900s section; in fact, I think this approach is the antithesis of the greater visibility for marginalized populations that they're aiming for. But I was heartened by the critical thinking that the students displayed in addressing important questions about the power of categorization and the limitations of selecting just one class number. The project showed that the librarian and students were not content to just complain about the DDC; instead they are taking the time to interrogate its underlying structure and engage in the difficult choices classification entails.
Students Khadij and Rachelle both referred to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk "The Danger of a Single Story," in which Adichie describes the harmful consequences of limited cultural representation—if we're only familiar with one account of a cultural group, we lack understanding of the richness of experiences of each person in that group. By limiting classification to only one location, the students argued, Dewey also tells a single story about the way the world is structured. The students also made a complaint I've heard before: that Dewey erases intersectionality, the framework that considers the interweaving of multiple forms of oppression (such as racism, sexism, or ableism) in understanding how social identity affects an individual's experiences in society. While I understand their frustration, especially when a small library is using abridged numbers to express complex concepts, I'll discuss in a later blog post how the DDC does allow for at least some representation of intersectionality in class numbers.
If you weren't able to attend the symposium, you can hear more from Bard Early College students and librarian Jess deCourcy Hinds on episode 15 of the Library Bytegeist podcast: "Classifying Books, Classifying People."
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