EPC 142, the in-person meeting of the Editorial Policy Committee, took place September 23-24. The editorial team is now working on following up on the decisions from that meeting, publishing the exhibits that EPC approved and making plans to address issues in exhibits they sent back for revision.
One of the exhibits they approved was a topic that was brought to our attention by Mary Kiely, Cataloguing & Acquisitions Librarian at Dublin City University, who got in touch on behalf of the Library Association of Ireland Cataloguing & Metadata Group (LAICMG). Mary emailed us to ask about Gaelic games, sports which are played primarily in Ireland and are governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association, especially the most popular of those games, Gaelic football and hurling. Those sports were given at including notes at 796.33 and at 796.35, respectively, and Mary wanted to see if these were good candidates for being continued to their own class numbers.
Mary and her team worked with me to check the literary warrant for some of the most popular Gaelic games in WorldCat and in Irish library catalogs, and we determined that Gaelic football, hurling, and camogie met the twenty-title threshold for their own class numbers. We suggested creating a class-here note for Gaelic games as a whole at 796.309415 Ball games—Ireland (Island) and added a scatter-see reference for specific Gaelic games. We proposed creating new numbers: 796.337 Gaelic football and 796.3592 Hurling and camogie (these are essentially the same sport played by men [hurling] and women [camogie]). We also suggested clarifying that Gaelic handball should be classed at 796.312 Court handball. EPC had a spirited discussion about the correct number for Gaelic games as a whole, since the games are played primarily in Ireland but also in pockets around the world by members of the Irish diaspora; in the end, EPC members approved the exhibit as proposed.
I asked Mary what she would say to other librarians who were interested in making changes to Dewey. She wrote:
While writing up the Dewey exhibit seemed daunting at first, collaborating with Violet made this a very interesting and enjoyable experience. I'm delighted to see the exhibit has been accepted, and Gaelic games are now clearly represented in Dewey, a classification system used in thousands of libraries worldwide. If you are interested in a particular topic but unsure where to begin, contact Violet or one of the other Dewey editors and take it from there.
You can view the exhibit which Mary and I co-wrote to propose these changes. To see all the changes associated with this exhibit in WebDewey, click the "Updates" button at the top of any WebDewey page, and where it says "projects," select project EPC 142-S79.1.
photo: camogie players in action ("Garda V Defence Forces" by dfmagazine is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Comments