025.431: The Dewey blog

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 They have continued to use SAB – even after 2014, when the SAB classification system was no longer updated.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How is it possible to use a classification system which is no longer updated?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.

Portrait of an editor: Constantin Mazney

Courtesy Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan

I have been researching previous editors of the DDC for a project you may hear more of later this year. As you can imagine, much has been written about some of these men and women; several have their own Wikipedia articles. But details on a few of them were scarce, even in John Comaromi’s excellent Eighteen editions of the Dewey Decimal Classification, published in the DDC’s centennial year of 1976. One of those was Constantin J. Mazney. We knew Mazney was editor-in-chief for Edition 14, published in 1942, but not much more. In this post, I’ll share more details I found, along with the work of a few people I thank at the end.

Constantin John Mazney was born May 17, 1889, in Odessa, now in Ukraine, then a part of the Russian Empire. He had a musical background, first earning a music degree from Moscow Imperial Conservatory (now Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory) before immigrating to the United States in 1923. He listed his occupation as choirmaster in 1929 when applying for naturalization. We also know he worked as a schoolteacher in Detroit during this period.

In the US, Mazney studied at the University of Michigan. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in library science there, and worked in the university library from 1935 to 1938 before moving to the Library of Congress. At Michigan, Mazney studied under Margaret Mann, who recommended him for the DDC editorship after the death of Dorcas Fellows. According to Comaromi, it was largely in deference to Mann that Mazney was chosen as editor-in-chief.

Mazney oversaw the production of Edition 14, but it was unfortunately not a smooth process, exceeding its budget and missing deadlines. I can only speculate as to whether World War II exacerbated this—maybe I’m projecting current-day “supply chain issues” onto the past! Shortly after its publication, Mazney was relieved of his position by the Decimal Classification Committee.

Whether or not World War II more directly affected the production of Edition 14, public records from around that time show Mazney registered for the military draft, though he would have been in his 50s at this point. Records from the University of Michigan have him at the “Research Library” in Upton, NY in 1949, perhaps at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Incidentally, one of the operators of Brookhaven today is Battelle, a research organization OCLC has collaborated with most recently for the REALM Project.)

At any rate, Mazney seems to have returned to Washington, DC at some point, and died here in December 1951. He never married. He willed about $5500, around $50,000 today, to help fund a University of Michigan student award in Mann’s honor, which is still in place today (and not to be confused with ALA’s Margaret Mann Citation).

I enjoyed learning more about this man who had my job (more or less) 80 years ago, and hope you found this an interesting read too. If you have any corrections or additions, I’m happy to hear them. For people of Mazney’s time, we only have literal paper trails, and can only piece together the whole story from sometimes ephemeral documents. I hope future biographers will have an easier time of it. I ditched Facebook over 10 years ago, but my LinkedIn is reasonably up to date.

My thanks to MP Satija and Allie Alvis for research assistance, and to Jacob Nugent at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library for the same, plus the image. The timing of this post is coincidental, and has been in the works for several weeks.

What makes the DDC so powerful; or, How do I build a number about using astrology to determine the best care for kittens? An explainer

Because I’ve been sequestered at home for far too long, I've been rereading the classic history of the DDC, The Eighteen Editions of the Dewey Decimal Classification by John P. Comaromi. Comaromi was the editor in chief of Dewey from 1980 to 1991, and he describes the history of the classification in technical critiques of decisions made as well as describing the personalities involved. Reading his book is a great way to recognize all the multiple points at which the development of the DDC might have gone in different directions, if not for personality quirks or external pressures.

Since I'm at the part of the book where he's talking about one of my favorite things about the DDC, I'll take that as an opportunity to talk about add instructions. Add instructions were formerly referred to as "divide like" notes; the concept itself has been present since Edition 1 of the DDC back in 1876. Add instructions are absolutely the best thing about Dewey! But they're also an aspect that non-catalogers don't necessarily know about, since they can be challenging or impossible to spot without guidance provided by the schedules.

There are a few different types of add instructions that appear in Dewey. One of the most frequent is adding from one of the six Dewey tables. For example, at the number 737.49 Coins of specific countries, a note tells you to "Add to base number 737.49 notation […] from Table 2." So a work about Chinese coins would be classed at 737.4951 (that is, the base number 737.49 + the Table 2 number for China, 51).

A slightly different type of add instructions tells you to add one part of a number to another base number. For example, the number for astronomical works about moons is 523.98 Satellites and rings. At that number, you'll find the note "Add to base number 523.98 the numbers following 523.4 in 523.43-523.48." That's a little tricky to parse, but it's easier when you can look over at the 523.4 hierarchy and see that that's where the numbers for non-Earth planets in our solar system are found. Once you know that, for example, the number for Mars is 523.43, you can follow the instructions given above: Add to base number 523.98 the numbers following 523.4 in 523.43, that is, 3. So the class number for the moons of Mars is 523.98 + 3, that is, 523.983.

And my very favorite thing in Dewey is when you get the chance to add notation 001-999. That means that, at certain numbers, you can add the whole set of Dewey numbers (like, all of them, from 001 all the way to 999) to a base number! Let's see what that looks like in practice with the example 133.58 Application of astrology to specific topics. The add note there says "Add to base number 133.58 notation 001-999." That means that you can add any Dewey number to the base number to reflect what the astrology of that subject is. Do you have a book about astrology and crime? Just take the base number 133.58 and add the number for crime, 364.1, and smash 'em together, so the number for the application of astrology to crime is 133.583641. A book on the astrology of making pizza? 133.58 + 641.8248 = 133.586418248! A book on the astrology of caring for kittens? 133.58636807!

It may just be my isolation-addled brain saying this, but if that kind of number building isn't fun, I don't know what is!!

"Cosmic kitten" by Nicolas Raymond is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Shall Not Be Denied - Women's Suffrage at the Library of Congress

On June 4^th the Library of Congress debuted their new exhibit, ‘Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote,’ commemorating the centennial anniversary of the campaign for women’s suffrage. This movement lasted over seventy years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified into law in August 1920, granting millions of women the right to vote. The exhibit, located in the Jefferson Building, showcases letters, photographs, posters, and other items from the beginning of the movement to the present day. Visitors can read diary entries from famous suffragists and listen to songs that both praise and ridicule the idea that women should be active participants in democracy. They can view desperate telegrams written about women arrested for their protesting and watch the speeches of female politicians who owe their work those honored by the exhibit.

Comprehensive items about the woman’s voting rights movement in the United States should be classed at 324.6230973 Women—suffrage—United States. This number is built using 324.623 Women’s suffrage + T1—09 History, geographic treatment, biography + T2—73 United States. Examples of titles classed here are A history of the American suffragist movement and Jailed for freedom: The story of the militant American suffragist movement.

One of the most moving items on display is a scrapbook once owned by suffragists Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter Anne Fitzhugh Miller. The book’s open page features a rare photograph of Harriet Tubman, most likely taken at her home in New York. Works on this abolitionist and suffragist can be found at 326.8092 Abolitionists (Antislavery activists). Build this number by starting with 326.8 Emancipation and adding T1—092 Biography. Works classed here include I am Harriet Tubman and Harriet Tubman: slavery, the civil war, and civil rights in the 19^th century.

‘Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote’ will be on view through September 2020. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore the history of the women’s suffrage movement in person.

Welcome to new Dewey intern Emily Zinger

Every year OCLC runs an intern program which provides paid experience to students, many of whom are studying library and information science. For the last few years one of those interns has been the Dewey Decimal Classification Intern, located here at the Library of Congress. We are pleased to welcome the newest Dewey Intern, Emily Zinger, to the Dewey team for the summer!

Emily is currently an MLIS student at the McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Before beginning her MLIS, Emily worked as a transcriber for the Georgian Papers Programme in partnership with the British Royal Archives, where she generated metadata and trained machine learning software to automatically transcribe the personal papers of King George III in order to create a keyword searchable digital archive of these documents. The GPP ignited her general interest in the digital humanities and led to her current work with the McGill’s Taylor White Project which aims to describe a collection of over 900 never published 18^th century scientific watercolors of birds, mammals, and reptiles, bringing together research in art history, history of science, and biology. As Data Manager for this project she coordinates the digital preservation across all research efforts and leads the construction of its upcoming digital exhibition for the McGill Rare Books and Special Collections library. Emily is also beginning an independent research project on library anxiety and the possible effects of personal reputation on this construct, which will serve as a continuation of her undergraduate research in socioecological psychology.

Emily will be taking on an editorial role during her time with us, investigating potential changes to the DDC by researching publication trends and subject areas. She’ll also be helping us with our ongoing community engagement work by working with librarians who are interested in proposing Dewey revisions. Emily’s work will hopefully make a few appearances here on the Dewey blog—stay tuned to see what she accomplishes during her twelve weeks with us!

 

Announcing the Truman Decimal Classification (TDC)

Newly-found photographic evidence confirms what was long held to be an urban legend: the creator of our beloved decimal classification system was, in fact, US President Harry S Truman!

Credit: W. Eugene Smith

This discovery is particularly ironic because Truman's middle name was simply the initial "S," many copy editors (and amateur grammarians) have questioned whether the period belongs in his name. While the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum assures us that the dot after the "S" is justified, we beg to differ—the dot, in fact, belongs squarely after the initial three digits of any TDC number.

When, among his many other achievements, Truman made time to design the system, and how it came to be attributed to an obscure, late 19^th-century librarian, remain unclear at this time.

To illustrate this clear break from the past, we recommend that going forward, works about the Truman Decimal Classification be classed not in 025.431, but 394.262.

 

FAQs of a New Dewey Editor

Since I started as Dewey Editor, it's been fascinating to hear people’s responses when I tell them about the position, both from people within the library world and outside of it. I'd like to share some of the most frequently asked questions that I've received.

[incredulously] People still use Dewey?!

YES!! It's the world’s most widely implemented library classification, used in over 130 countries around the world. Here in the United States, it's used by most public and school libraries. Elsewhere, such as in Europe, it’s also used in national bibliographies and academic libraries.

What exactly do you do all day?

One of the biggest parts of my job is researching publishing trends to ensure that the numbers in Dewey are up-to-date and that people who are classifying materials have clear directions for how to apply the DDC for resources in new or changing subjects. That also includes revising the current schedules; for example, right now I'm working on a proposal to update the language used in the schedules for LGBT issues. It's a collaborative effort; the editors all give each other feedback on finding the best approach for various challenges. Other editorial tasks include answering questions from library workers around the world about using the DDC and staying current on changes in other classification systems.

You're located at the Library of Congress? Don't they have their own classification?

They do. But there's a team of classifiers here at the Library of Congress who assigns Dewey numbers to new materials. (If you speak MARC, that team supplies the numbers in the 082 field.) The Dewey classifiers assign over 60,000 class numbers each year; that provides libraries that use Dewey with authoritative class numbers for the new resources they receive. The editorial team relies on the classifiers to let us know when there are areas of the DDC that aren't as robust as they need to be.

How many people are on the editorial team?

There's just four of us: two full-time editors, and two part-time senior editors.

So, what, y'all are *in charge* of Dewey?

Not really. The editorial team and the classifiers are just some of the people who make Dewey magic happen. Once editors research potential changes to the schedules, they bring those proposals to the Editorial Policy Committee, a 10-member group of people representing libraries from around the world. The EPC gives feedback and votes on whether to implement the changes that the editors propose. The DDC is owned by OCLC, so we work closely with teammates in Dublin to explore new ways of using Dewey data to provide access to users. The editors also collaborate with software company PANSOFT, the current developers of WebDewey, to make updates that make WebDewey easier and more effective to use.

LCC rules, DDC drools.

That’s not a question.

What's your favorite Dewey number?

They’re all beautiful in their own way.

What's the future look like for Dewey?

So bright we've got to wear shades. Right now we're working to make improvements to the system which feeds data into WebDewey so schedule changes are made more smoothly and new updates can be rolled out. We're excited about OCLC projects which will harness the subject access provided by Dewey classification into enabling new modes of discovery. And we're looking forward to making community feedback a more integral part of the way that the DDC is maintained and updated to ensure a truly global perspective. Stay tuned!

Welcome to our newest editor

We're pleased to welcome Violet Fox to the editorial team! Violet joined us on June 18 and is based out of the editorial offices at the Library of Congress. She previously worked in cataloging and metadata at the University of Illinois at Chicago and at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. She received her MLIS from the University of Washington in 2013 and has an undergraduate degree in history.

Her professional interests include exploring the ethical implications of classification and empowering library workers to be an active part of making subject access more responsive to user needs. Violet previously worked in the Dewey office as a summer intern in 2012 and 2013, mapping the most frequently used LCSH to DDC for access in WebDewey. In her spare time, Violet sends snail mail, visits offbeat museums, organizes zine events, and writes about roadside attractions in her own zine.

Happy retirement, Rebecca!

Rebecca Green retired as Dewey editorial program manager June 30—but not quite; she is still working on a proposal or two for Editorial Policy Committee Meeting 141 (scheduled for October).

Rebecca joined the Dewey editorial team in 2007 and became editorial program manager in 2016. Prior to joining OCLC, Rebecca was an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, where she had been a member of the faculty since 1989.

In the Dewey schedules, Rebecca focused on the 000s, 200s, 320s, 400s / Table 4, and 700s, where her efforts led to new or enhanced developments in many areas, including 3D printing, big data, biometric identification, computational linguistics, computer security, digital media, handheld computing devices, natural computing, noSQL databases; information storage and retrieval (ISAR) systems (including the Web as an ISAR system), institutional repositories; concepts of God, local church, voodoo, Latter Day Saint movement, Orthodox church; political ideologies; prescriptive linguistics vs. applied linguistics; schools, theories, and methodologies of linguistics; regularization of language variations; 20th and 21st century art styles; concertos, keyboard vs. accompaniment. Rebecca was also involved in long-term efforts to implement a major revision for angiosperms and to determine how best to represent indigenous nations.

Rebecca enjoyed working with Dewey as data. She has worked to expose additional history-of-numbers information in the WebDewey History box, to enhance Dewey data with “hidden” fields that enable WebDewey’s number building engine to function properly, to present historical period notation for localities in the 900 schedule in a way that will work with the number building engine (to be available soon), and to develop machine-assisted identification of equivalence and hierarchical relationships between Relative Index terms.

She has presented scholarly papers at SIG-CR workshops, ISKO conferences, NASKO symposia, and UDC seminars on such subjects as the topical basis of see and see-also relationships in Dewey, Dewey classes as topic neighborhoods, facet detection based on WorldCat data, and the treatment of indigenous nations.

She has used her teaching skills in training interns and new editors, in preparing teaching modules, and in presenting workshops in the United States, Canada, and Sweden.

Often when teaching or preparing posts for the Dewey blog, Rebecca’s playful side appeared, as with the Dewey palindrome challenge (here and here).

We wish Rebecca well in pursuing her personal interests:

005.743

220

289.332

401.43

782.5145

786.5

Good luck, Rebecca, in this new phase of your life!

Dewey Team Staff Update

Welcome to Marti Heyman, Executive Director, WorldCat Operations

Marti Heyman recently joined OCLC as the Executive Director of WorldCat Operations, which includes managing the Dewey editorial team.  She comes to OCLC from Cengage Gale and brings a wealth of experience running metadata operations in various organizations including DuPont, Oracle, Deloitte, and Dow Jones.  She has deep experience in many facets of information and knowledge management, with an emphasis on knowledge capture, storage, and retrieval in a manner that facilitates maximum return for the enterprise. She has extensive experience designing, developing, implementing, and maintaining controlled vocabularies designed to maximize content discovery and access. She has led pilot projects requiring the adoption and implementation of linked data.  Marti also co-chairs the NISO Content and Collection Management Committee and has been active in numerous efforts to develop NISO Recommended Practices. She earned her MLIS and MBA from Drexel University and is currently an adjunct within Drexel’s College of Computing and Informatics teaching graduate level courses on Content Representation and Library Management.

Goodbye to Libbie Crawford, Product Manager, Dewey

Libbie Crawford will be leaving her position of Product Manager for Dewey at the end of May.  Libbie would like to share the following thoughts with the community:  "For the past 15+ years I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the international Dewey community.  Accepting the position with Dewey has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in my lifetime.  Now it is time for me to give back to the community in a different way.  For quite some time I have been working with charities in the Cincinnati area that address literacy and homelessness. I plan to increase my involvement in those two areas."

Welcome to Sandi Jones, Product Manager, Dewey

Sandi Jones will be taking over as the new Product Manager for Dewey.  Sandi has worked at OCLC for over 30 years in various roles in cataloging and metadata services, including serving as the product manager for Contract Cataloging and WorldCat Cataloging Partners services, which both integrate Dewey workflows.  She has great experience working with libraries and partners worldwide, and she is excited to join the team.

New Director of WorldCat Quality and Dewey

OCLC is recruiting for the new leadership position of Director of WorldCat Quality and Dewey. 

The person who fills this role will have responsibilities that include:

• managing continuous updates to the DDC,
• working with national libraries worldwide to maintain high DDC standards,
• coordinating DDC translations, and
• driving decisions about the exciting possibilities of working with the DDC as a key linked data reference in the semantic web.

OCLC continues to recruit for this position; if you know of someone who might be appropriate for this position, please have him or her contact Marti Heyman at heymanm@oclc.org.