A History of the Dewey Decimal System
The history of the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC) hearkens back to the very beginning of the modern library movement in the nineteenth century. The classification scheme’s progenitor was a man named Melvil Dewey who was born to a poor family in upstate New York in 1851. 1 His full name was Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, but he was a man who supported language/spelling reform and had his named shortened to just Melvil Dewey. He even tried to have his family name further shortened to Dui. 2 In this he failed, but this is only one failure amongst his many successes. Dewey had a profound effect on the library movement in America. He originated the DDC in 1873 and had it published and patented in 1876. There has been some speculation that Dewey synthesized ideas from a number of sources and coordinated them into a unified system. There is some evidence to suggest that Dewey may have been introduced to the idea of a decimal classification by a pamphlet written by Nathaniel Shurtlaff in 1856. 3 The DDC may also have been partly adapted from a scheme that William Lorrey Harris had formed from a structure expressed by Sir Francis Bacon, and refined by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. 4 Regardless of where the scheme emerged from, however, Dewey was the first person to properly expand on and define his ideas concerning a classification that placed books into a relative order based on disciplines rather than an alphabetical order, or one that simply identifies a shelf space for a specific book. The DDC was the first timely modern system that introduced features like relative locations and a relative index. This allowed books to be placed in stacks based on their relationships to one a...
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...n: A Study Manual and Number Building Guide, (Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1998), 10.
10. Mona L. Scott, Dewey Decimal Classification, 21st Edition: A Study Manual and Number Building Guide, (Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1998), 29-32.
11. Russell Sweeney, “The International Use of the Dewey Decimal Classification,” International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control v. 24 (October/December 1995): 61.
12. Forest Press, “About Dewey and OCLC Forest Press,” 2003, (24 March 2003).
13. Forest Press, “Introduction to the Dewey Decimal Classification,” 2003, (24 March 2003).
14. Forest Press, “Introduction to the Dewey Decimal Classification,” 2003, (24 March 2003).
"Amazon." Encyclopædia Briticanna. Ed. The Editors of The Encyclopædia Britannica. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2013. .
...ed Manuscripts, a Guide to Technical Terms. Malibu, Calif.: Paul Getty Museum in association with the British Library, c1994. Print.
Dewey the library cat is probably one of the most noteworthy cats that has ever been heard of. Dewey is an orange little tabby cat that the writer (Vicki Myron) found in the rain on her way to work, and brought Dewey with her to the library. From that instant Dewey the library cat grew up in a library lying on every book that he has seen. His name came from the Dewey Decimal System. He has unintentionally inspired thousands of people by being himself. He has Myron and the rest of the library staff play with him, feed him, and take care of him. He was truly the cat that everyone who has read it loved him. Even though some people didn't feel the same after reading Dewey. Dewey had a long life in the library that taught people to have fun, be happy, and be nice to people. He changed the author since she found him and being friends for years she wanted to share how she felt. His life is filled with multiple acts that inspire the mass of people who read it.
...n conjunction with other types of classification systems in a library environment. The LCC schedules contain a higher level of specificity and detail than those in DDC. This is as a result of subject matter expects constructing areas of the schedule. The primary users of LCC may be subject matter experts or those who want to consult a classification system with a high level of specificity.
Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Trans. E. Talbot Donaldson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
These documents were kept in an organized manner in archives with labels that could identify each item. It could, therefore, give the archivist an easy time in tracing a document (Buchanan, 2012).
Though many of the people around us enjoy the luxury of having access to libraries and books everyday, that is not the case for the vast majority of people around the world.
The ONIX standards for metadata are XML-based standards intended to facilitate the transfer of bibliographic and production information along the book and e-book production and supply chains. Its origin and development were originally intended to organize and standardize supply chain metadata for the publishing industry, but libraries soon found many benefits to its use, and now several methods of incorporating ONIX data into library catalogs exist. This paper focuses on ONIX for Books, which includes the standards for both printed and electronic books. According to EDItEUR, the organization responsible for the development and maintenance of ONIX standards, “ONIX is founded partly on principles developed within the project and upon the EPICS data dictionary, but is firmly rooted in real-world use cases and the practices of book supply chains in many countries.” (Best Practices, 2014.)
In 1837, in a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “ American Scholar “ he made a remark about books. He stated, “ Books are the best of things, well used; abused among the worst.” Within this quote, he stated the importance of book within a society, about its use and impact. However, he spoke about the subject in a very distinct manner, causing the rise of many ideas and interpretation of the quote. To a certain extent this quote is true, books are one of the best tools that one can utilize to do almost anything when it is used properly. Otherwise, it can cause the rise of different useless ideas and at times also cause the misdirection of a population.
Baron, N. S. (2005). Who wants to be a discipline? The Information Society, 21(4), 269-271.
In the world of preservation and library science the common focus is on preserving content, ensuring its longevity, findability, and a stable consistent metadata and technology solution, However we live in an age where everyone is a publisher of some form, and more consistently the content they produce will be in a digital rather than analogue form. Within that content there will always be varying amounts of metadata, some will be populated with an immense detail and granularity, some content will have been created with no human intervention to add additional information to it. In fact much of the digital material produced will have been done so by people who have no concept of metadata, and no inclination to know about it or time to use it. The question raised by Smiths statement highlights many of the issues around data preservation and digital content, with metadata only being a part of those issues, but integral to the ongoing management of the massive influx of digital content being produced.
The discussion into the relevance of this question can only be fabricated based on the definitive consideration of the internet, a key digital facet that expedites the abrasion of print publications. The internet has rendered access to information very effective, easy and strategic. Gone are the days when one would walk miles to the nearest library in order to satisfy their appetite for reading. With the internet, information storage has largely been restructured and can be retrieved in various digital forms. It is therefore commonsensical to assume that many publications, previously in print form, will eventually appear in digital format as e-books. To champions of printed books, this futuristic scenario provides the basis for their arguments.
At this point in time the computer was being integrated into organizations, and viewed by many as a boon to information management. While the major use of computers was reserved for technical and science librarians, reference librarians were adopting the use of computers since the amount of material a reference librarian was required to know was becoming impossible to keep up to without a computer’s aid. Librarians were, and still are, expected to be aware of the newest techniques and have the skills to use new technologies on the
Technological advancements within ICT have paved the way to new and innovative methods of how information flows within a business. In the past (and currently), the Bibliographic Chain Model was a prominent source which illustrated and categorised the flow of information from an individual, or a human resource, into various kinds of formats. The main problem with the bibliographic chain, however, is that it was modelled in 1976 (by J.M Doyle and G.H Grimes) which would imply that it is fairly outdated with regards to how technological developments back would have influenced how information circulated.
However, iIn spite of the current pre-eminence of e-books, it may be argued that they are not likely to replace print books anytime soon or possibly at all. Both formats have their advantages and drawbacks, which makes for one of them difficult to replace the other. Moreover, they serve differents needs and purposes. E-books are famous for their portability. Hundreds of e-books can be stored on a single device. Thus e-books don’t take shelving space and are convenient to take on travel, while even a few paper books are bulky and quite heavy to carry around. Numerous e-books are in open access, while paper books are not routinely available free of charge. E-books may be acquired and accessed immediately online, a feature I enjoy especially and treasure most: many a time I was able to buy and read an e-book at home within minutes of learning of its existence. Needless to say, e-books are considerably easier to cite and quote than print books, since the copy-paste feature spares us the trouble of retyping the quoted text. Another important advantage of digital books is their specialized software, which makes reading much easier: search and reference tools, changeable font size and day/night mode, dictionaries. Last but not least, e-books conserv...