Welcome to the first of a new series of explainers about Dewey Decimal Classification basics. I love chatting with folks about the work I do, especially answering questions about how the classification grows and changes. I'm looking forward to sharing what I know in this series, and I'll be glad for any suggestions you have for potential topics (you can email us at dewey@oclc.org or leave them in the comments below). In this post, I'll talk about literary warrant, the basis for judging which concepts get their own Dewey number.
Melvil Dewey originally published the DDC in 1876 as a method of organizing knowledge in print. He had a very practical focus on standardizing library classification and cataloging with the primary goal of efficiency. Though this terminology hadn't been coined yet, he was working with an early conceptual idea of literary warrant—that is, the principle of basing a classification on the amount of published literature. To help understand literary warrant, it helps to contrast it with other methods of determining warrant: for example, a classification could be based on a specific religion's understanding of how the world is organized, which would be a type of cultural warrant. Literary warrant uses the body of published literature as a way of representing the structure of knowledge.
In the modern history of the DDC (since the publication of the 16th edition in 1958), the editors have committed even more strongly to the idea of literary warrant—instead of editing the classification in line with abstract ideas about the way things are, a new classification number is added only when a specific number of resources have been published, then collected and cataloged by libraries. That number has been arbitrarily set within our editorial rules at twenty works. When librarians ask about creating a new number for a specific topic, one of the first things we do is determine whether at least twenty works have been published primarily about that topic, demonstrating a need for a new number. (This differs from the Library of Congress Classification, where just one new book on a topic justifies the inclusion of a new provision in the schedules.)
In one way, relying on literary warrant removes some of the personal bias of the editors. Instead of making decisions based on our own decisions of what is valid (which would be heavily shaped by our cultural background and personal opinions), we have a clear test of whether a concept should be included in the DDC or not. On the other hand, literary warrant perpetuates a different cultural bias. We know that not all knowledge is reflected in published literature. The only way we have to measure literary warrant is based on library catalogs (like, for example, WorldCat), but we know that not all published works are collected by libraries or fully cataloged.
It's important to recognize that literary warrant is just one warrant that could be chosen to organize information, which has benefits and drawbacks. For an interesting review of how literary warrant works as well as information about other types of warrants, check out the Literary warrant article by Mario Barité on ISKO's Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization.
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