025.431: The Dewey blog

Table 2 updates: Kosovo and the Philippines

The changes approved at EPC 143 include two substantive updates to Table 2. We have provided new notation for Kosovo, and updated the previously incomplete coverage of Philippine provinces.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 as the Republic of Kosovo. Roughly half of the world’s countries recognize Kosovo as independent. Serbia considers the area to be the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, part of Serbia.

The new notation for Kosovo, T2—49719, has both Kosovo i Metohija and Republic of Kosovo in its class-here note, indicating that the notation can be used regardless of where one falls on this divide. It follows the DDC’s principle of organizing Table 2 by geography rather than political boundaries necessarily.

Discussion at the EPC raised the interesting question of what this change meant for the neutrality or impartiality of the DDC. Does adding such notation not implicitly take a side, and say that Kosovo is independent? The change was not motivated by a desire to take a side, but we recognized that not making a change might also be seen as implicitly taking a side (i.e., that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was illegitimate).

More informed people than me have written on whether libraries are, can be, or should be “neutral”, often with very different ideas of what that means, but the case of Kosovo in the DDC certainly feels like a case where true neutrality – think not naming any country – would greatly hamper utility.

Over in the Philippines, things are much more straightforward, at least in that it was just a matter of giving fuller coverage of the country in Table 2. With the recent changes, we’ve gone from seven Table 2 numbers under T2—599 Philippines to 102!

Unlike many countries, the Philippines has a clear basis for organization in Table 2 before political boundaries: its islands. Indeed, besides T2—59916 National Capital Region (former caption: Manila), all of the notation previously only went as far as four digits, for major islands and island groupings.

The recent changes were primarily about providing for the country’s 81 provinces, though we also accounted for the 17 organizing regions. Most of the provinces were previously in including notes. T2—5991 Luzon island and adjacent islands was particularly crowded! Here’s how it looked in the print DDC 23:

My thanks to the user in the Philippines who got the ball rolling on this some time ago. What’s next for Table 2? Expect some expansions in South Asia and Central Asia, along with some updates for countries that have reorganized, like Morocco and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

Outdated terms in the DDC: Aliens

Now that EPC 143 has concluded, you should already be seeing changes published to WebDewey. Last week, we rolled out the first batch of changes analyzed by our editor-in-residence, Kelly West. There’s more to come, but this batch specifically focused on the use of “aliens” for people resident in a country in which they aren’t citizens. (Not extraterrestrials, but the confusion there is one reason “alien” is becoming deprecated in the field more broadly.)

The saga of the LCSH “Illegal aliens” has been told frequently, to the point where it is presumably the only LCSH with its own Wikipedia article. The short version: it was most notably critiqued by a group of student activists at Dartmouth College in 2014, and over 7+ years, it was eventually replaced. The LCSH had been mapped in WebDewey, and was replaced there after the Library of Congress made the change.

While the DDC never used the exact phrase “illegal aliens”, we still had several places where we used “aliens”. The case against “illegal aliens” was more than that exact phrase. Alone, “aliens” tends to conjure up images of extraterrestrials – notably, non-human beings – and in general, it’s never good if you’re alienated, or experiencing alienation. Kelly’s EPC exhibit included further research on this, along with other potentially problematic terms.

We have now greatly reduced the use of “aliens” in the DDC. In most cases, it was replaced with “Noncitizens”, similar to what the Library of Congress did. We attempted to avoid unique coinages though, so we preferred existing terms such as “Foreign labor” to the novel “Noncitizen labor”.

The only place you’ll still see “aliens” (in this sense) is in the Relative Index. The see-also reference there to Noncitizens tells you that this is a nonpreferred term. There is a strong argument for completely removing potentially offensive terms like these in user-facing systems; the term’s use in the Relative Index doesn’t change that. But it’s still a term classifiers are likely to run into, whether in older works or in legal contexts where the exact word is used.

The index entry continues to provide access for classifiers, while pointing to the correct, current term. We also reduced the appearance of “aliens” in the index to just the interdisciplinary number (305.90691) and the standard subdivision (T1—08691), so we replaced terms with subheadings like “Aliens—literature” with “Noncitizens—literature”, etc.

Expect to see similar changes in the future, both in the shorter term from Kelly’s work and in the longer term as we continue to ensure the DDC’s terms for people are accurate, current, and respectful.

Dewey Decimal Classification – 10 years in Sweden!

Guest post by Harriet Aagaard

We celebrated the anniversary with a delicious chocolate cake at a Dewey reference group meeting last year.

The National Library of Sweden started using Dewey in 2011. 10 years of use is something to celebrate, but due to the pandemic we have postponed the celebration until November 10 2022. We plan to host a seminar celebrating the anniversary.

The Swedish translation and the transition from SAB, a Swedish classification system, to DDC was done during 2009-2011. The Swedish translation is not a full translation into Swedish, but a mixed translation. In 2011 about 40% was translated into Swedish, while 60% remained in the original English. Today about 67% of the Swedish WebDewey is translated to Swedish. The goal is to translate all.

Most Swedish cataloguers have a good knowledge of English, but it turned out to be complicated to search for subjects with both Swedish and English index terms in the Swedish WebDewey. In 2014, I gave a presentation about the pros and cons with the Swedish mixed translation at the annual European DDC Users Group (EDUG) meeting.

The National Library and university libraries started using DDC instead of SAB in 2011, but most of the public libraries and school libraries stuck to the SAB system. Still today only about 20 public libraries use DDC. Among them are some public libraries in the larger cities – such as Malmö, Gothenburg and Umeå – but not the largest public library, in Stockholm.

Public libraries and school libraries have smaller collections as well as a larger proportion of Swedish books in their libraries, which reduces the need of a very detailed classification system. They have continued to use SAB – even after 2014, when the SAB classification system was no longer updated. Sweden is a small country, and both the Swedish Library Association and the National Library decided that it would not be possible to keep updating two national classification systems.

How is it possible to use a classification system which is no longer updated? SAB differs from DDC in several ways:

• Instead of very specific codes, the SAB system uses several codes to describe the topic or topics.
• New subjects are often easy to fit into broader subject categories.
• Since the SAB system was developed in Sweden it is easy to fit in specific Swedish subjects.

However, without national coordination, classification practice regarding new subjects can vary at different libraries. This is in some way counteracted by using the same catalogue and sharing records. Since 2018 public libraries in Sweden are a part of Libris, which makes it easier to co-operate on SAB classification in an informal way. On the other hand, it would also be easy to co-operate on DDC classification.

Another problem is that it is difficult to find new cataloguers with a good knowledge of classification with SAB.

Most Swedish libraries use the national union catalogue Libris, for cataloguing and importing records to their local catalogues. University libraries import a lot of records from other countries to Libris and most of these records are already classified with DDC. The transition from SAB to DDC took a lot of effort, but it has paid off well. Classification is a time-consuming task and sharing classification codes with other libraries in Libris nationally as well as internationally is efficient.

Harriet Aagaard is an administrator/librarian at the National Library of Sweden and the current Secretary of EDUG.

Results of EPC 143

The Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) met virtually in June to consider the slate of exhibits finalized back in May. Most were approved, and you’ll be seeing them rolling out into WebDewey in the coming weeks. (One is already there! More on that soon.)

Two exhibits were sent back for further work:

• EPC 143-S29.1c - 297.48 Sufi orders
• EPC 143-S30.1 - 304.8 Movement of people

For EPC 143-S29.1c, there was consensus among the committee that more specific Sufi orders should be provided for, beyond those proposed in the exhibit. We welcome feedback from users around the world, or anyone with interest or expertise in the topic, even if they aren’t users, to help represent Sufi orders that are frequently the subject of published literature.

On EPC 143-S30.1, the topic is just complicated! Where do you class a work on immigration to a specific country, emigration from a country, or works that cover both? When does a work on immigration belong with community sociology or political science instead of the interdisciplinary number? We’ll revisit the issue at the next electronic EPC meeting, towards the end of this year.

Keep checking the blog for posts highlighting specific changes from EPC 143 as they’re added to WebDewey, but keep your eye on the WebDewey updates feed too, as not every exhibit will necessarily lead to a blog post.

Last but certainly not least, there are a few new (and returning!) faces joining EPC, and that will lead to a blog post!