Guest post by Rebecca Green
The 2012 publication of the last print edition of 200 Religion Class was accompanied by a Dewey blog posting that included the following explanation:
Another exciting feature of 200 Religion Class is an optional arrangement for the Bible and specific religions based on a chronological/regional view. For some time now, we have been exploring the development of an alternative view of 200 Religion to reduce Christian bias in the standard notational sequence for the Bible and specific religions. In cooperation with Ia C. McIlwaine (University College London, and the former editor in chief of the Universal Decimal Classification [UDC]) we have prepared a chronological/regional view of the Bible and specific religions based on a similar development introduced in the UDC in 2000. The new optional arrangement appears in appendix A of the print version of 200 Religion Class, and in a new Manual note at 220-290 Optional arrangement for the Bible and specific religions in WebDewey.
That blog posting also announced that a virtual browser based on the optional arrangement and linked to Dewey-classified resources in WorldCat.org was under development. This browser was subsequently made accessible at https://www.oclc.org/en/dewey/resources/religion/browser.html.
As the Manual note at 220-290 Optional arrangement for the Bible and specific religions specifies, the intention of the optional arrangement “is to provide an alternative view of 220-290 without any changes to the DDC notation.” This is accomplished by, first, using the captions provided for each area, e.g., Taoism, Buddhism, Religions of North American native origin, Judaism, Christianity, Islam; and then, within each religion or specified group of religions, subarranging in Dewey number order. On the one hand, this approach has the significant advantage of not requiring any change in notation. On the other hand, the approach also has disadvantages. One of these disadvantages is that the notation specifies the order of resources only within specific religions, not across the religion resources of an entire collection. Unless one has a firm grasp of the optional arrangement, using the notation to locate specific resources may hit some road bumps. A second disadvantage is that prominent non-Christian religions still make use of longer notations.
At the request of the Editorial Policy Committee (EPC), we have developed a mapping from the standard notation for 220‒290 to the Optional arrangement for the Bible and specific religions. This mapping provides a notation that mirrors the optional arrangement while standing in one-to-one correspondence with the standard notation. The mapping is implemented through a series of add instructions and has been designed to provide a notational footprint that takes into account the size of a religion’s literature, its number of adherents, and its perceived significance. For example, where Islam occupies a single three-digit number, 297, in the standard notational sequence, in the mapping from the standard notation to the optional arrangement, Islam occupies a range of eighteen three-digit numbers, 281–298. Note, however, that the set of notations generated by the mapping do not constitute official optional numbers for the 200s. The mapping exists only as a subsection of the Manual note at 220-290 Optional arrangement for the Bible and specific religions; no option notes have been added to standard numbers in the 200s. Implementation of this mapping faces the disadvantage of requiring significant resources to change the notation associated with all the resources in a collection classed in 220–290. After implementing the mapping, the notations used in a collection would not match those used by most other collections. However, since the numbers generated by the mapping are in one-to-one correspondence with standard Dewey numbers, both making the changes involved and relating mapped and standard notations could be supported automatically. An institution would need to consider whether the disadvantages of implementing the mapping are offset by using a notation that better represents the religions of the world and their literatures.
The new mappings can be accessed through WebDewey, via the Manual note for 220-290, or at https://tinyurl.com/optionalDDC220-290.
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