Journal Entry Week 8: Classification

In this week’s activity we learnt about the classification schemes of the Dewey Classification (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC).  These two classification concepts are used by general libraries to group collections that are similar together.  According to Shirky (2005), these terms are "the act of organizing a collection of entities, into related groups. In this particular week’s activity we were required to use these two classification schemes to classify a book by Jamie Oliver.

The use of these two schemes was designed for physical resources. With this said, both these schemes have been around for the past 200 years meaning that they may be harder to incorporate to our digital age.  Shirky (2005), states that while these systems have been adapted somewhat, new less rigid measures like subject tagging are showing up their limitations. The DDC is the most popular scheme used for classifying books within libraries. The usage of LLC and DCC depends upon the workload since Dewey decimal system is more widely used whereas complex system of a library could be handled with LLC (Broughton, 2004).The enumerative scheme that is used in the DDC classification scheme can be used to create notations for physical resources that have complex string numbers as subjects for classification. Thus, with resources that don’t need specific searches to locate them, the DDC is very appropriate. The DDC uses a decimal system in order to categorize collections since it’s method of categorization is numerical. Nevertheless, its weakness directly associates with resources that have subjects with longer strings.

All resources should be classified with the appropriate method to assist users and librarians with understanding them.  

References

Broughton, V. (2004). Essential classification. New York: Schuman

Shirky, C. (2005). Ontology is overrated: Categories, Links and Tags. Accessed 05/10/13.  Retrieved from:http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html.