025.431: The Dewey blog

Would you Adam and Eve it?

The Believer! It's "intellectual yet playful." It's "rigorous yet amiable." It featured Tintin, Mark E. Smith, and Ian McEwan on its cover in successive months. How could it be anything other than the Dewey blog's favorite magazine? And that's even before you consider that the Believer is the only popular magazine (as far as we know) to tempt readers with featurettes that consist entirely of lists of DDC numbers recently mapped to Library of Congress subject headings. Here, for example, is an extract from the list published in February 2006 (on the same page as an interview with stand-up comedian Demetri Martin) of "Dewey Decimal Classifications of various endings":

Road closures—388.312
Retraction letters—070.44
Lost articles in literature—T3C—355
Ex-football players—796.33092, 796.332092
Same-sex divorce—306.89

Thanks to Rivka Galchen and Aaron Harnly for getting the Dewey word out in this way. Needless to say, we're all believers here at the Manor.

Goodnight, Irina

And so it came to pass that the Winter Olympics stopped. Taking time out from her HBO hit Da Ali G Show, Sasha Cohen narrowly failed to win the figure-skating gold for the US; Jamaica, disappointingly, missed the bobsleigh title by a whisker once again; and the Dewey blog was left to ponder why, if he's really so speedy, "Speedy" Peterson doesn't compete in an event where speed is more directly a factor, like a race or something. Talking of figure skating, we wanted to let you know that, although the subject has been listed in the DDC since, ooh, at least 1989 (at 796.912, under 796.9 Ice and snow sports), the Library of Congress has only recently created a subject heading for it, which we mapped to the DDC just the other week. Nice!

All-New Dewey Teaser: DOA?

Okay, so the All-New Dewey Teaser went down like a mouthful of soggy spaghetti. How could all those expensive focus groups have got it so wrong? Needless to say, the minion whose idea this was has been summarily dismissed and, last we heard, is currently attempting to eke out a living hawking his sad collection of keywords to search-engine advertisers. All that remains of the whole sordid affair is our promise to tell you precisely where we ended up deciding to class works on neoliberalism, educational attainment, and phishing. Without further ado, or indeed any ado at all, let's give it up for 320.51 Liberalism (not 320.513 Modern liberalism), 306.43 Education (under 306 Culture and institutions), and both 005.8 Data security and 364.163 Fraud. Controversial? Nous? If you think so, let us know. Otherwise, what we really want to know is: Does the All-New Dewey Teaser really have all the appeal of a wet Wednesday in Luton (T2—42567)? Or could it work if we tweaked it a little? Or does anyone have any better ideas for getting weekends off to an appropriately Deweytastic start?

All-New Dewey Teaser #1

Finally, the suspense is over. It's the moment you've all been waiting for! The return of the Dewey Teaser, in its all-new, genre-busting format. Well, we say "all-new" -- but in one crucial respect, it's just like the Old Dewey Teaser: it's simple. All you need to do is tell us where in the DDC you would class the following:

1. a work on neoliberalism;

2. a work on educational attainment; and

3. a work on phishing.

All three subjects are taken from recent Weekly Lists of new subject headings issued by the Library of Congress: "Neoliberalism" appears in WL 22 of June 1, 2005; "Educational attainment" and "Phishing" are from WL 23 of June 8, 2005. The DDC editors will be mapping DDC numbers to these headings next week -- so, watch out for our answers next Friday!

That's all, folks

Dewey blog readers around the world will rejoice at the results of the high-level crisis meeting we had at the Manor yesterday -- that lazy "Ideas of the year" riff has finally been put to bed. (Until next year.) Actually, it transpires that we could all do with a bit of a rest, so this will be the final blog entry of 2005. We'll be back on January 3, Twenty-oh-six! (Mark those calendars.) Oh, and the next set of LCSH/DDC mappings will be posted on the Dewey web site on January 6. In the meantime -- from everyone at the Manor to everyone out there in Deweyland -- happy holidays!

The loom of language

As part of the continuous process of updating the DDC so that it remains consistent with the most current information available, the editors make constant use of a wide variety of authoritative reference works across the full range of subject areas that Dewey covers (i.e., everything). Over the next few months, the Dewey blog will be highlighting a few of the most useful of these reference sources -- starting today with a giant in the field of linguistics. Ethnologue: Languages of the world, 15th ed. (2005), edited by Raymond G. Gordon, Jr., and published by SIL International of Dallas, TX, is a compendium of information about 7,299 living languages that includes an index of 39,491 distinct names for those languages. The 1st edition of Ethnologue appeared in 1951; the 14th edition was published in 2000, and access is currently available, free-of-charge, to electronic versions of both the 14th and the 15th editions, on the web at http://www.ethnologue.com/. Ethnologue arranges individual languages in a hierarchy of families according to the relationships determined to exist between those languages, and the resulting tree structure is easily browsable at the web site. Dewey editors' development of the hierarchical structure of the DDC's Table 6 (Languages), and their decisions as to the location within this structure of individual languages and as to the preferred forms of language names that appear in DDC captions and indexing, have been informed by Ethnologue data since the preparation of DDC 20 (published in 1989). The recent mapping of the LC subject heading "Ngoni language (Tanzania and Mozambique)" to T6—96391 Central Bantu languages    Central eastern Bantu languages, for instance, was done after consulting Ethnologue's "linguistic lineage" for Ngoni, which places it in the Manda group in zone N of the Narrow Bantu family of Niger-Congo languages. We don't always view Ethnologue as the final word, however: sometimes consultation with authorities in particular localities leads us to conclusions that differ from Ethnologue's. A case in point is our relocation of the South African language Ndebele to T6—963989, i.e., in the Nguni group (rather than the Sotho-Tswana group) in zone S of the Narrow Bantu family.

Identity crisis

"Identity is the crisis," sang Poly Styrene. "Can't you see? Identity; identity." An incisive critique of the plastic society of '70s Britain, to be sure, but sadly of little assistance to the DDC editors when it came to resolving a little situation that we came across in the vicinity of 111.82 Unity (under 111.8 Classical properties of being in 110 Metaphysics), which is indexed by "Identity (Principle of)." This is the place for philosophical works on identity as a general property of things, whether or not those things are people; the philosophical concept of identity applied to the human self is indexed at 126 The self as "Identity (Human)--philosophy." Meanwhile, works on personal identity written from the perspective of psychology are classed at 155.2 Individual psychology, which is indexed (among other terms) simply by "Identity (Human)" with no further subdivision. We spotted at least two problems here: first, that the number for interdisciplinary works on personal identity is incorrectly specified in the Relative Index as 155.2; and second, that the occurrence of the parenthetical qualifier "(Human)" erroneously gives the impression that the "Identity" indexed at 126 and 155.2 is a completely different concept from the "Identity" indexed at 111.82. The results of our rethink are as follows: index 111.82 with "Identity--philosophy"; 126 with "Identity--philosophy--humans"; and 155.2 with "Identity--psychology." Make sense? Oh, and if you're wondering why it suddenly occurred to us to do this -- well, we've just mapped the LC subject heading "Identity (Philosophical concept) in art" to 704.949126, and had to come up with our own Relative Index term for the new built number. Which, after the dust settles, will be (drum roll, please) ... "Identity--philosophy--humans--art representation." We'll leave the last word to Poly: "Clear as crystal. How do you feel now? I want to know ..."

The Island: Untethered

It's not every day an island lands in your backyard but that's what happened to one unfortunate homeowner in Springfield, MA, a few weeks ago. Given that the event made front-page news in yesterday's New York Times, it seems a shame that the island in question doesn't even have a name, but is known only as "the island" of the pond around which it floats. (In a flight of fancy, the pond itself is called Island Pond.) With our fingers on the pulse as always, and almost simultaneously with the latest Island Pond catastrophe, we mapped the Library of Congress subject heading "Floating islands" to DDC class 551.42 Islands and reefs in earth sciences. The particular work that inspired the creation of this subject heading is Chet A. Van Duzer's Floating islands: A global bibliography (Cantor Press, 2004), which includes the author's translation of Georg Christoph Munz's eighteenth-century treatise on the subject, Exercitatio academica de insulis natantibus. From Van Duzer's preface: "Natural floating islands may be most broadly described as floating pieces of land which commonly consist of peaty soil made buoyant by gases released by the decomposition of vegetable matter, or else masses of buoyant aquatic vegetation that often, but not always, have substantial amounts of organic sediments trapped among their intertwined roots ... [A]rtificial floating islands [are] designed for various purposes, including wildlife (especially bird) habitat, human habitation, improvement of water quality, and as airports." We also mapped the related subject heading "Floating islands in literature" to —32142 Islands (under —32 Places) and to —36 Physical and natural phenomena in Table 3C—3 Arts and literature dealing with specific themes and subjects, although a work with this subject has yet to be cataloged.

La table du jour

Table 3C. It's everyone's favorite table, right? Who can resist a table that rejoices under the snappiest of snappy titles ("Notation to Be Added Where Instructed in Table 3B, 700.4, 791.4, 808–809")? Where else can you find Count Dracula, Joan of Arc, and Odysseus in standing room at the same class (T3C—351 Specific persons)? Or a more complete list of the Dewey editors' collective preoccupations (T3C—353 Human characteristics and activities*)? And that's before you even start looking at the LC subject headings that have been mapped to T3C numbers over the years. Take T3C—3559 Customs, for instance. This is the notation we use to express the subjects of cocktails in literature, cries in literature, and "Staffs (Sticks, canes, etc.)" in literature. Wondering how to handle the classic works on rabies in literature? T3C—3561 Medicine, health, human body is the class you need, and that one would work for pyromania in literature too. Back to T3C—353 and you'll find animal magnetism, brainwashing, humiliation, mistaken identity, sibling rivalry, and "Triangles (Interpersonal relations)" in literature. Donkeys in literature? That's easy: T3C—3629665. And for the latest blockbuster on nothing in literature ... well, look no further than T3C—384 Philosophic themes. Table 3C: we salute you.

* Alienation, chivalry, dreams, fear, friendship, happiness, heroism, justice, melancholy, personal beauty and ugliness, pride, sexual orientation, snobbishness, success, vices, and virtues.

Classification Club

The first rule of Classification Club is -- you do not talk about Classification Club. The second rule of Classification Club is -- you DO NOT talk about Classification Club. The third rule of Classification Club is -- if in doubt, prefer 121.5. The fourth rule of Classification Club is -- the longer the number, the smaller the spine. That's our favorite, the fourth rule (a.k.a. Gorman's Third Law of Librarianship). Because everyone loves immensely long Dewey numbers. It's Friday, and it's only too clear that what the world needs today is another unfeasibly lengthy Dewey number. So we've got one for you. It's 791.436526230975091734, which is the number we mapped the other week to the Library of Congress subject heading "Rednecks in motion pictures." What's that? You want an even huger Dewey number? You're addicted. Can anyone help?