025.431: The Dewey blog

EPC 143A exhibits available for review

In January, we'll have Electronic Meeting 143A of the Editorial Policy Committee (EPC). You can view the following revision proposals at oc.lc/deweyexhibits: 

• EPC 143A-S29.1 - 297.48 Sufi orders
• EPC 143A-S30.1 - Movement of people and 325 International migration and colonization
• EPC 143A-S73.1 - 730 Sculpture and related arts
• EPC 143A-S94.1 - Ionian Islands
• EPC 143A-T1.1 - Further updates to terminology for groups of people

EPC will be voting on these the week of January 30-February 3. Please share any feedback, positive or negative! You can do so by commenting on this post, posting to the the Dewey Contributors Google Group, or by email to dewey@oclc.org or an EPC member.

Genrifying with DDC

A colleague shared a blog post with me: Genrify your Catalog, not your Collection! Written by Leanne Ellis, a School Library Coordinator for the New York City Department of Education’s Department of Library Services, it’s a great quick read on some of the pitfalls you can encounter if you ditch classification altogether—but it also has some helpful tips for getting the best of both worlds.

Many of the benefits touted by libraries who have genrified their collections are not incompatible with an organized classification system. I’m thinking of more eye-catching signage, more colloquial labels, or shelving attractive covers facing out. All of those are ways you can promote usage of your collection without sacrificing the organization you get with a classification system.

Reorganizing a collection is no trivial task, so there’s a lot to be said for drawing on some of the advantages of a genrified system without losing out on the organization and interoperability you get with the DDC and other classification systems.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried methods like this and what your results were. And of course, we can still improve things on the editorial side! If you have ideas for changes you’d like to see in the DDC, I hope you’ll get in touch.