025.431: The Dewey blog

Dewey Teaser: The half-dozenth

Well, the only person to get last week's teaser right was too shy to display his problem-solving prowess in public, resorting to a personal email to the editor. Congratulations, sir -- since only you and I have any idea who you are, you will be inducted into the Dewey Hall of Fame as the Unknown Librarian. The source of the quote was Charles A. Goodrum's Dewey decimated (Crown, 1977), "A Werner-Bok Library mystery" that was nominated by the Mystery Writers of America as best first mystery novel, don't you know. Okay, this week's teaser is easy. Easy, I tell you! We're expecting a correct answer within seconds! The question: Which library clerk had this fit?

"I guess you didn't know we have a system for putting books away here. No, I'm curious. You were just randomly putting that book on the shelf, is that it? You've just given us a great idea. I mean, why are we wasting our time with the Dewey Decimal System when your system is so much easier? Much easier! We'll just put the books anywhere. Hear that, everybody? Our friend here has given us a great idea! We'll just put the books any damn place we choose! We don't care, right?! Isn't that right?"

Dewey Teaser: The fifth column

It might not sound as if this week's teaser has much to do with the DDC. But if you know the answer ... well, you'll see the connection. So here goes: From which murder mystery is this extract taken? Tell the world. Don't be shy.

They parted and George turned to the left and followed the hall around to the door opening into the eastern wing: Division of History and Literature. He entered and looked around the room for the first time. It was a large, high-vaulted reading room like any of a thousand others in the country's public and university libraries. He searched for the ubiquitous card catalog, found it, sought a title in its trays, and filled out the traditional call slip. He handed it in at the desk and waited at a nearby table. He was tired. He found he was too tired even to reason, so he stared in front of him musing on all the other rooms like this he'd sat in in the past fifty years. He had enjoyed it himself, he knew, but what impact did all the effort, the getting and the organizing and the keeping have? His mind slipped to a picture of Karl Marx writing, writing, writing in the British Museum and he smiled in spite of himself. Librarians had been using that one to prove they were never quite sure what for years.

100 not out

Well, we weren't exactly inundated with responses to last week's teaser -- surprisingly, we thought, since the author of the quoted reminiscence is one of the official Triumvirate of Famous Librarians. No, not Mao Tse-Tung or even Casanova, but the poet Philip Larkin, who spent most of his working life as an academic librarian, latterly at the University of Hull. The quotation comes from the short essay "Single-handed and untrained," which you can find either in Larkin's Required writing: Miscellaneous pieces, 1955-1982 (University of Michigan Press, 1999), or in the collection Long overdue: A library reader (Library Association Publishing, 1993) edited by Alan Taylor.

No new teaser this week, because whaddya know, whoda thunkit, etc., but today's entry is our hundredth, and in time-honored tradition, we're celebrating by saluting all the "hundreds" in the DDC. There's class 100 Philosophy & psychology itself, of course. There's the Hundred Days of 1815 (March 20 - June 28), in standing room at 944.05 Period of First Empire, 1804-1815. We've got the Nineteen hundreds (Decade) indexed at T1—09041 1900-1919, and again in World history at 909.821 1900-1919. Sure enough, the Twenty hundreds (Decade) are also there at T1—090511 2000-2009. The LC subject heading Hundredth Day of School is mapped to 372.18 Student activities--Elementary education. (According to LC's authority record, "many schools in the United States and Canada celebrate the 100th day of school with educational and recreational activities involving number 100.") And finally, there's the Hundred Years' War, which (as any fule kno) actually lasted 116 years (1337-1453) and therefore doesn't count. For the record, it approximates the whole of 944.025 Period of House of Valois, 1328-1589. Don't worry: the next time we'll be doing anything like this again will be for our thousandth entry -- sometime in 2009.

Dewey Teaser Goes Fourth

It's that time again, and boy, have we got a humdinger of a Dewey quote for you this week. Tongues have been wagging at Dewey Manor about barrel-bottoms being scraped, but let me tell you -- there are few more-capacious barrels than the barrel we're rattling around in right now. Your teaser today: Whose memoirs?

In 1903 the library had, of course, been closed access; in the Thirties an effort had been made to modernise its methods, opening the doors to readers and constructing an issue desk. There had even been purchased a copy of the current edition of Dewey. Otherwise it remained antiquated. The boiler (which I had to stoke, if not light) did little to heat the radiators, which were in any case poorly placed; the real warmth of the building came from the gas lights, that had to be illumined with long tapers that dropped wax over the floors, and even on myself until I learned how to handle them.

Don't read this, it's too graphic

One of the proposals that were discussed at last week's meeting of EPC is a relocation of the number for comprehensive works on graphic arts, from 760 to 740. The thinking is that such a relocation would solve a number of problems: the duality of the heading currently shared by Graphic arts and Printmaking and prints at 760; the double set of standard subdivisions (one set for graphic arts and one for printmaking and prints) currently at 760; and the current positioning of the number for graphic arts after the numbers for two subclasses of the graphic arts (drawing and drawings at 741 and painting and paintings at 750). The new heading at 740 would be Graphic arts and decorative arts, and 760 would be just Printmaking and prints. As with any relocation, we're still weighing the benefits of the improved development against its potential impact on current collections. But since this particular relocation would amount to a change in the second summary (i.e., the hundred divisions) of the DDC, there are additional factors to take into account. You know all those posters sold by ALA Graphics with a list of the divisions on them? Well, they'd need to be changed for a start. On that note: Have you perused the ALA Graphics catalog recently? Lots of rather excellent Dewey-related stuff licensed from OCLC -- not just the posters, but Dewey mugs (emblazoned with the DDC number for tea, natch), Dewey cat and dog collars (636.8 and 636.7), Dewey nightshirts ... Yup, Dewey nightshirts. Can anyone else spot the demographic that ALA is hitting up here? Whatever next? Dewey carpets? As it happens: yeah. People are working on the Dewey carpet idea as we speak. The Melvil Dewey bobblehead can't be far away. But what other consumer durables would benefit from the addition of a subtly inscribed class number? Specifically, how much am I bid for this lovely leather 006.5 iPod® case?

EPC Day 2

Of course, everyone got it right -- the source of last week's quote was indeed Allen Kurzweil's The grand complication (Theia, 2001) and his description of Class Struggle, the parlour game we all grew up playing, right?

But we have no new teaser for you this week, because there's so much to report on from yesterday's second installment of EPC Meeting 124. We continued to talk about graphic novels, and then we talked about them some more, and actually we're still talking about them. But rest assured: when we do make a decision, we're going to nail it. We did at least decide where to class works on how to write graphic novels: in standing room at 808.06 Rhetoric of specific kinds of writing. Diane Vizine-Goetz from OCLC's Office of Research gave us a fascinating demonstration of DeweyBrowser (see our earlier blog entry here), Terminology Services, and Curiouser. As colleagues have already reported, users of DeweyBrowser have recently been given access to two new databases: a set of 2.2 million WorldCat records for the works most widely held by libraries, and the set of authority records for classes in the Abridged version of the DDC. We're currently looking into a method by which users would be able to use DeweyBrowser to suggest index terms for DDC numbers -- stay tuned for developments!

Staff members of the Library of Congress's Decimal Classification Division (pictured) hosted a coffee break so that EPC members could see Dewey Manor's engine room in all its glory, before we returned to agree upon an expansion for Terrorism at 363.325 that we'll be posting on our "New and changed entries" site before the end of the year. Giles gave a great talk on what the future holds for WebDewey and our much-loved (but elderly) Editorial Support System, and we discussed strategies for training of and communicating with DDC users. One of the things we intend to do in the latter regard is to discontinue the Dewey tips in favor of sharing advice through this blog instead.

The pictures here show EPC enjoying a little 641.812 and a couple of editors reacting with some consternation to a Queso de Tupí a few short hours after updating the development for the Tupí at T5—9838.

Dewey Teaser: Episode III

So was last week's poser too easy? Or did we just stump you? The lines about the auspicious events of 1898 were John Ashbery's, from his poem "Memories of Imperialism" collected in Your name here (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000). Moving swiftly on, then, here's our latest DDC-related literary extract. All we're asking for from you is the source. Actually, just to ramp up the excitement to almost unbearable levels, this week we're also inviting you to append to your response an expression of your admiration or contempt (as the case may be) for the work in question. A mini-review, if you will. Amazon®, eat your heart out!

   Dinty pulled another card. "629.134. I repeat --"
   Ting.
   Mr. P.'s leathery hand tapped a bell plunger. "Jet engines?"
   "Jet engines is correct,*" said Dinty crisply. "But I caution you to wait to be called upon. I shall give you points this time. I won't be so generous in the future. Now for the bonus, Mr. Paradis. 629.134 ... 3537. To repeat: 629.1343537."
   Mr. Paradis tugged on a strap of his overalls. "May I?"
   "Go on."
   "That'd be fan-jet engines."
   "Correct again."
   Amid raucous cheering, Norton and I ducked out of the Reading Room to repatriate The Book of Hours.

* Editor's note: Actually, 629.134 is for comprehensive works on aircraft components; works on jet engines go down in 629.134353.

Dewey goes pop

Some readers may have been laboring under the misconception that the Dewey decimal system has not often acted as the object of affection of your average singer/songwriter. Whereas, in fact, there is a rich tradition of allusion to the world's favorite classification scheme in modern popular music. R. Stevie Moore relates the story of the boy who found his girl "system-atical-ly" through the DDC; while the Vicar assures me that the band Dewey Decibel is "in the vanguard of nerd rock." Track 8 on Bakelite's eponymous 2004 album is entitled "Dewey Decimal System." (Track 10 on the same record is called "Here's the Theory"; track 11 is "Division of Fractions." It's sure to be a laugh riot when the Bakelite guys hit town.) The Defog have a song called "Dewey Decimal" which is on #6 of the Buzzlighter compilation series; and among the 26 tracks on Spazz's 1997 LP, "La Revancha," one of the longest (at a minute thirteen) is "Dewey Decimal Stitchcore." April March & Los Cincos begin one of their songs (which one? I can't remember) with a recitation of part of the Second Summary of the DDC: heady stuff. Meanwhile, the latest craze in the trendiest New York clubs (or "biblios," short for "bibliothèques") is the complicated dance move known as "approximating the whole." (Those looking for a more relaxing time can always repair to the club's chill-out zone, known colloquially as the Standing Room.)

Revenge of the classy comic character

Remember Rex Libris? He with the future of civilization resting heavily on his shoulders? We humbly suggest that it might behoove Rex to ask, "What would Dewey do?" For whenever we DDC editors get in a fix -- and, yes, it does happen -- that's what we ask ourselves. But do we mean Dewey the noted spelling reformer, or Dewey the "determinedly ironic young adult librarian who would rather read comic books or play games than work the reference desk, or indeed do any kind of work at all"? And are there any other classification/comic-book crossovers we should be recommending?

Dewey Teaser: Part Deux

Thanks to our correspondent who goes by the mysterious sobriquet of "Make mine a double" -- to what could Sir or Madam possibly be referring? -- you might have gathered that last week's fine quotation comes from the mouth of the character Catherine in David Auburn's 2001 play, Proof. John Madden's movie adaptation, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine, has just opened in the US ... Anyone know if the reference to Dewey made it to the big screen?

Onward to this week's competition (for which, thanks Jeff!). Author and title please ...

Dewey took Manila
and soon after invented the decimal system
that keeps libraries from collapsing even unto this day.
A lot of mothers immediately started naming their male offspring "Dewey,"
which made him queasy. He was already having second thoughts about imperialism.
In his dreams he saw library books with milky numbers
on their spines floating in Manila Bay.