025.431: The Dewey blog

Changing climates

My DDC career started in 2011, when I was the first ever DDC intern. Fresh out of the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, I had assigned DDC numbers to around a thousand works in a side job for an environmental nonprofit in the area. I had seen firsthand how those works were going all sorts of places in the schedules, and during my internship, I thought I might put together a proposal to bring them together.

That never happened, because I realized that environmental studies is interdisciplinary by nature. That’s not to say one couldn’t bring them all together—the Chinese Library Classification largely does, in its X section—but doing so would have caused significant disruption elsewhere in the schedules.

I picked up the cause again a few years ago, both out of personal interest and requests from users and colleagues, such as those at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Probably the biggest issue I found was a lack of the phrase “climate change” in the DDC at all. The closest thing we had was “global warming”. As much as there is warming around the globe, you probably hear “climate change” more often now, as we’ve come to understand there’s more to it than just warming, such as extreme weather events or even significant cold.

In EPC Meeting 144, we took a big step forward on the topic of climate change in the DDC. You can review the full exhibit for more of what went into this, or see the changes now live in WebDewey. Today, I just wanted to highlight some of the more significant aspects of it:

• Climate change and global warming are now in the class-here note at 363.7 Environmental problems. This recognizes climate change as the central environmental problem, allowing for number building throughout this hierarchy. Previously, global warming was in a class-here note at 363.73874 Greenhouse gases, a more technical number under pollution. Users often prefer shorter numbers, and this means climate change is at a number valid for abridged classification.
• We have designated 551.6 Climatology and weather as the comprehensive number for scientific works on climate change. Previously, the Manual note 551.5 vs. 551.6 seemed to push you more towards 551.5 Meteorology. That may still be appropriate for some works, but trying to separate climatology from climate change science would just be too confusing.
• New topics such as climate justice and social consequences of climate change have been added.

I say this is a step forward both because it’s a very active area in science and because, like many editorial efforts, it’s brought our attention to other areas. So what’s next? Economic aspects. Expect to see work on topics such as carbon trading, environmental credits, and sustainable investing.

And as always, I hope you’ll be a part of those next steps. What are some topics that you’re having trouble classifying? What does and doesn’t work about the schedules for you? Like addressing climate change, maintaining the DDC is a group effort too.

Yoga and health

Guest post by Julianne Beall

We recently published a new number for therapeutic use of yoga (615.824) and a Manual note explaining how to classify various aspects of yoga in relation to health and disease at 613.7046 vs. 615.824, 615.851, 615.852, 616-618 Yoga and health. Here we highlight a few key points from the Manual note and give examples.

Use 613.7046 Physical yoga for works on preventive or "staying healthy" use of physical yoga, hatha yoga, yoga as exercise. Also use 613.7046 for comprehensive works on preventive and therapeutic use of all kinds of yoga. Examples:

Yoga for fitness and wellness

Yoga

Yoga for dummies

Use 615.824 Yoga for works on therapeutic or "regaining health" use of physical yoga, hatha yoga, yoga as exercise. Also use 615.824 for comprehensive works on therapeutic use of all kinds of yoga. Examples:

Recovery yoga: A practical guide for chronically ill, injured, and postoperative people

Healing yoga: Proven postures to treat twenty common ailments -- from backache to bone loss, shoulder pain to bunions, and more

Yoga as therapeutic exercise: A practical guide for manual therapists

For use of physical yoga, hatha yoga, yoga as exercise (or comprehensive works on all kinds of yoga) in treating a specific disease, begin with the number for the disease in 616-618. Then from the appropriate add table, add 06 Therapy plus 24 from 615.824 Yoga, following the instruction at 061-069 Specific therapies. Examples:

Yoga for arthritis: The complete guide 616.7220624

(616.722 Arthritis plus 06 Therapy from add table at 616.1-616.9 Specific diseases plus 24 from 615.824 Yoga, following instruction at 616.1-616.9:061-069 Specific therapies)

Gentle yoga for back pain 617.5640624

(617.564 Backache plus 06 Therapy from add table at 617 Surgery, regional medicine, dentistry, ophthalmology, otology, audiology plus 24 from 615.824 Yoga, following instruction at 617:061-069 Specific therapies)

Pneumonia and COVID-19

Guest post by Julianne Beall

In the March 2 blog post COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019), we said that we were not sure where to tell you to class works on COVID-19. Now we have updated WebDewey with three new subdivisions of 616.241 Pneumonia:

• 616.2412 Bacterial pneumonia
• 616.2414 Viral pneumonia
• 616.2416 Fungal pneumonia

We have indexed "COVID-19 (Disease)—medicine" to 616.2414 Viral pneumonia.

What about the non-respiratory complications of COVID-19? These two notes under 616.1-616.9 Specific diseases are relevant:

Class a work treating all the complications of a disease with the disease, e.g., all the complications of diabetes mellitus 616.462

Class a work that focuses on one specific complication with the complication, e.g., peripheral nerve disorders associated with diabetes mellitus 616.856

Thus, a work about all the complications of COVID-19 would be classed with COVID-19 in 616.2414 Viral pneumonia, but a work that focused only on renal failure as a complication of COVID-19 would be classed in 616.614 Renal failure.

The number 616.2414 Viral pneumonia can be added at various places in the 610s and elsewhere. For example, the interdisciplinary number and social services number for viral pneumonia in humans (including COVID-19) is 362.1962414. The number for incidence of and public measures to prevent viral pneumonia in humans (including COVID-19) is 614.592414.

COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019)

Guest post by Julianne Beall

We hope you are not yet trying to classify books about COVID-19! Why? Because we are not yet sure where to recommend that you class them.

Remember SARS? When we indexed "Severe acute respiratory syndrome—medicine" to 616.2 Diseases of respiratory system, we were following MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). The MeSH heading Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has Respiratory Tract Infections as the immediate broader term in the MeSH tree structure.

MeSH has not established a heading for COVID-19, but it has established a MeSH Supplementary Concept record. COVID-19 is mapped to Pneumonia, Viral. If the heading, when it is established, has Pneumonia, Viral as the immediate broader heading, we will index COVID-19 (Disease)—medicine to 616.241 Pneumonia.

The 616 number can be added at various places in the 610s and elsewhere, e.g., interdisciplinary number and social services number for respiratory tract diseases 362.1962, interdisciplinary number and social services number for pneumonia 362.196241; incidence of and public measures to prevent respiratory tract diseases 614.592, incidence of and public measures to prevent pneumonia 614.59241.

Stay tuned!

First round of EPC 142 exhibits available

As part of the editorial team's ongoing efforts to get the Dewey community involved in the editorial process, the first round of proposals for Meeting 142 of the Editorial Policy Committee are now available for public review and comment on the Dewey Exhibits page. The following exhibits are now available:

• EPC 142-S33.1 333.9554 Resource economics of mollusks
• EPC 142-S36.1 362.88 Victims of crimes
• EPC 142-S53.1 Mechanics in physics
• EPC 142-S62.2 LED lighting
• EPC 142-S95.1 Historical periods of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau
• EPC 142-S98.1 Historical periods of Brazil

The meeting will take place September 23-24, 2019, so you have some time. You may share comments via email to [email protected] or to individual EPC members, or use the Dewey Contributors Forum.

Further updates for classification of living organisms

Readers of the Dewey blog will recall that we recently extensively revised 583-584, updating the schedules for angiosperms in accordance with the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group's updated classification of flowering plants (APG III). And last week, you got to meet Dewey and Deci, OCLC's new resident swans. We noted in the latter post that you might have noticed some other changes in the schedules for living organisms. These changes were approved at Meetings 139 and 139A of the Editorial Policy Committee earlier this year. All told, the changes come throughout the schedules at 579, and from 585 to 599.

None of these changes is quite as extensive as those implemented for angiosperms. The basic taxonomic classification of non-angiosperm plants (585-589), animals (592-599), and microorganisms, fungi, and algae (579) has not changed, but notes at these numbers have been systematically streamlined. The changes will make these areas of the schedules easier to navigate and to translate into other languages.

Prior to these changes, common names and scientific names have been mixed in the same headings and including or class-here notes. For example, if you look in a print copy of DDC 23, the including note at 592.3 Worms reads, "Including Echiurida (spoonworms), Phoronida (horseshoe worms), Pogonophora (beardworms), Priapulida." Items in including or class-here notes are typically arranged alphabetically, but in these cases, the common names get a bit scattered, since they're attached to equivalent scientific names.

We haven't used multiple class-here notes at the same number before, but there are some instances of multiple including notes scattered in these parts of the schedules of the print DDC 23. Take a look at 597.73 or 595.763 for an example. In those cases, you’ll find common names in both notes, because some are in parentheses next to scientific names. Section 7.18 of the Introduction allowed two including notes in the taxonomy schedules, but there were still plenty of instances where all terms were lumped into one note. (We're in the process of updating the Introduction to reflect the new practice.) The updated version looks much cleaner, and brings consistency to this area. Instances of class-here notes that mix scientific and common names have also been split; this is a new practice.

For headings that had both types of names, we've moved the term in parentheses to a class-here or an including note, depending on whether the topic approximates the whole of the class. So as we noted last week, 598.4184 Cygnus buccinator (Trumpeter swan) has been changed to 598.4184 Cygnus buccinator, and it now has a note, "Class here trumpeter swan." We expect a cataloger trying to make a classification decision will be looking for a specific name, whether common or scientific, so we hope this will make a given term easier to find.

The other main type of change in these schedules makes it easier to identify different terms in including and class-here notes, and should also ease translation. Let’s take a look at 597.9636 Vipera, about a genus of vipers. The print DDC 23's class-here note reads, "Class here asp; common, Lebanese, Portuguese, sand adders." If you take a second to process it, you can recognize that everything after the semicolon is a different type of adder; a term like "Portuguese" there doesn't stand alone, and "Class here Portuguese" wouldn't make any sense in this context anyway. The main benefit of this convention was conciseness. That’s crucial when you’re printing a four-volume print work, but not so much in a digital format. Here’s what we have now: "Class here asp, common adder, Lebanese adder, Portuguese adder, sand adder." No more need to look back and forth to match up your adjectives. Each term before a comma stands alone.

At some point, we'll revisit these areas of the schedules. Taxonomy of living organisms can shift a good deal as a result of scientific advances. Undertakings like the angiosperms update don’t get finished overnight, but in the future, we hope to encounter scientific consensus similar to that of APG III, so we can update accordingly.