The Power To Name Miscellaneous Things as Information

I want to preface this week's readings with a bit of difficulty with the readings primarily this week, but also from previous weeks. The readings so far seem to be written more for people who are already familiar with the topics contained within, rather than serving as an introduction to the topic(s) of the week. Hope Olson's article this week assumes we're already familiar with the Dewey and Library of Congress systems; another article that stands out is the first week's article on archives that just seemed entirely out of context, probably because it tried to show a real-life application of archives, whereas most of the class (myself included) is probably still struggling just to identify what archives and archiving are. I like to think that I'm fortunate to have already taken a couple library classes last year and to be enrolled in such a course as 551 this semester, to provide me with the background knowledge to know where Olson is coming from in her article. However, there are quite a few students in the course who aren't library students, who are probably only marginally familiar with cataloging, and as such are probably having more trouble than even I am understanding some of these articles.

Now, with that out of the way, it's time to discuss this week's articles. I want to focus primarily on the Hope Olson article, because 1) it evoked the most response from me and 2) I think I'll be doing my book report on Everything Is Miscellaneous. So, before I get to Hope, I'm going to discuss those points about Miscellaneous that drove me absolutely nuts. First of all, the book doesn't read as an argument with supporting evidence; rather, it reads as if David Weinberger is trying to defend his position from any possible criticism that one might have of his ideas. This defensive position is only the first of many things that makes this book a difficult to get through. The text itself is really quite simple, but it is the presentation that caused me to take nearly three weeks to read the whole thing. My second complaint is that Weinberger frequently re-uses examples. I'm sorry, that's a bit unfair; he uses, re-uses, recycles, uses again, and then for good measure, he uses once more his examples. Just look at the index: Linnaeus shows up four times, the Linnean Society one additional time outside those four, species three additional times, and insects and invertebrates each shown up scattered throughout these same pages many other times. Photos and digital photos are listed ten times and Flickr is listed nine times. I could go on, but I think my point is made: the repetitive nature of the book made it an exceedingly dull read when I found myself reading the same examples for the third, fourth, or even eighth times. Lastly, Weinberger has a way of making huge leaps near the ends of his chapters in order to tie back in the "miscellaneousness" of everything. I cannot remember exactly which chapter it happened in (another unfortunate side-effect of over-repetition of examples: I cannot distinguish one chapter from another), but I remember reading an in-depth example of something that Weinberger considered miscellaneous, when suddenly I was reading the chapter's conclusion which was completely disparate from what he had been talking about just moments beforehand. Suffice to say, I was not a fan of the Miscellaneous, and the failings of the writing style made me probably miss some of the points that Weinberger was trying to make.

Now, to talk about Hope Olson. This article definitely evoked the most response from me of any article we've read so far this semester. In particular, I wanted to address the point that she made about not being able to represent a black Roman Catholic middle-class male youth in Dewey. First of all, I was surprised that Dewey limits the use of Table 1 (I'm not sure what all is contained in Table 1, but it appears that it's a problem if you're trying to classify someone who fits in several social groups. However, her point that "[p]eople of African descent are diasporized throughout DDC by more than just geographical factors" (p. 655) is a problem that simply lingers from the era and location in which Dewey made his initial cataloging scheme. He created the system at Amherst, essentially WASP central, which would indeed put favor on the white, upper/middle class people. However, at this point, to change this system would require a complete revamping of Dewey. Just imagine the man-hours required to completely re-classify, re-label, and re-shelve all the books affected by this change! At this point, I think a more reasonable approach would be for librarians to place "see also" signage on the shelves, and possibly in the catalog, indicating where other books on the topic might be found. That brings me to another point: while some patrons will take the approach of shelf-browsing for books on their desired topic, others will consult a librarian, all of whom (should) know the work-arounds for Dewey, and how to find similar topics, even if they're not adjacent on a shelf. I suppose this ties back into a point made by Weinberger: with the limitations of physical space, each book can only be put on the shelf in a single place, thus requiring that we choose a "main" entry, or subject, and shelve the book there. Web 2.0 certainly offers alternatives to Dewey-like single entries, but most libraries are still not digital, Dewey's most certainly was not, and as a result we are still subject to the laws of physics. As such, Dewey is a good start to classification and the Library of Congress is a little better, but we clearly still have some room to improve.