025.431: The Dewey blog

Dewey blog links in WebDewey

Do you find yourself juggling between this blog and WebDewey? I’ve got something for you that may help!

Using the Comments feature of WebDewey, I provided links to Dewey blog posts from the past six months. In most cases, I just added one or two comments per post. For New T2 notation: Provinces of Nepal, for example, I added a comment at T2—5496 Nepal, but not its new subdivisions.

Don’t want to see these? You can click the downward arrow to collapse the Comments box, or move it out of the way with the four-arrow icon. And remember, you can always choose “Reset your screen layout back to defaults” under your Preferences if you want to try again.

Besides quick access to further guidance on the blog, this also provides another way to do keyword searching in WebDewey. Here’s a quick hack: do a keyword search “Typepad” to retrieve the 16 records I added to today. (Yep, the keyword search even reads the URLs!) I plan to add blog links for future posts too, so that should grow.

The caveats: not every blog post will necessarily garner a link. Announcements of events or EPC meetings, for example, probably won’t. What about older posts, earlier than November 2020? I hope to get to some of them in the future. But hey, the comments are public—you could add some too!

394.2: The Dewey blog turns 15

“Blogging. I know, I know -- it's soooo, like, 2004.” With those words, and the wonderful post title “Blogalicious”, the Dewey blog came into being. The Dewey blog was started by Jonathan Furner, then an editor and now an EPC member and professor of library & information science at UCLA. He brought a wonderful color to the blog, writing as the “Vicar of Dewey Manor” (I’ve occasionally tried to bring back “Dewey Manor” as a name for the Dewey offices). In April 2006, he returned to UCLA, where he had worked previously.

Most older posts on the Dewey blog just list “Dewey” as an author. As you can see by peeking with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the author used to be listed, appropriately, as Jonathan. As the blog was reconfigured to have multiple contributors, the cited author listed on those early posts changed accordingly. A few different authors along the way were attributed, including me, which… I won’t mention where I was in June 2005!

This is blog post number 1,008 on the Dewey blog. (Something to look forward to: 1,009 is scheduled for this Friday!) We’ve had about 10 regular authors and more guests, though an exact number is hard to pin down due to the aforementioned display quirk. We’ve had over 1.25 million page views (!) and 681 comments.

Over the years, you’ve probably noticed all sorts of content here, from lighthearted teasers and current events tie-ins to longer, more scholarly and technical posts. We like to mix things up, remaining accessible but also providing deeper dives when appropriate.

As we look to the next 15 years, what do you want to see from the Dewey blog?

Searching the Dewey blog

Are you almost certain you saw something on the Dewey blog that would help you with the resource you’re trying to classify, but you’re not sure where to find it now? How can you search the Dewey blog to retrieve something that was posted there in the past?

Several ways of searching the Dewey blog are available:

• Search by date
• Search by category
• Search by keyword

The sidebar on the left facilitates access to archived posts (i.e., entries posted prior to the current month) by date. While only the last ten months are listed in the sidebar, clicking ARCHIVES will give you access by month all the way back to the beginning of (Dewey blog) time, that is, June 2005. Clicking the name of a month then returns all the posts from that month. Search by date thus supports comprehensive access to everything ever posted on the Dewey blog, but, frankly, the occasions on which searching by date is efficient will be few and far between.

The sidebar on the right facilitates access to Dewey blog posts by category. Of course, a blog about a classification scheme would classify its posts. And, of course, a blog about the Dewey Decimal Classification would provide access to its posts by Dewey number. Hence the most widely used Dewey blog categories are the Dewey main classes. Clicking 000-099 Computer science, information & general works, for instance, will return blog posts on digital media, personal bibliographies and biobibliographies, NoSQL databases, big data, informatics, natural computing, and mobile computing devices, plus numerous other posts in which Dewey numbers in the range 000–999 play a less central role. (We have talked a little about re-doing some of the other categories, so don’t be surprised to see a blog post on that issue sometime later.)

But what about keyword search? In the past, you had only one option—use an external search engine (e.g., Google) for a keyword search of the Dewey blog. For example, searching site:ddc.typepad.com "big data" in Google will return links to the Dewey blog posts on big data and NoSQL databases mentioned above, as well as to a post on 3D printing.

You can now also enter your keyword search in the Google search box at the top of the sidebar on the left of the Dewey blog home page. Entering “big data” (as a phrase search) in the search box will return a few ads and links to the three blog posts mentioned above.

Because searches on Google incorporate automatic stemming, entering cook in the search box will return posts using various forms of the word, e.g., cook, cooks, cooking, cooker; if you really want to search for just cook, enter it as a phrase search: “cook”.

Note that automatic stemming is restricted to word forms and does not extend to searching on DDC notation. Searches like the following will work:

• T1--01
• 333.7-333.9
• 641.5

But a search on 641.5 will not retrieve a post containing 641.568 unless the post also contains 641.5 (which happens to be the case when 641.568 appears as 641.5/68).

For all practical intents, you can now perform the same searches and retrieve the same output by doing a Google search inside the Dewey blog as by searching Google independently of the blog. How cool is that?