Page 52 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 3: Notational System

Miksa (1998, 83-90) summarizes why Dewey created the kind of classification system that he did: Notes
“because that is how knowledge was viewed in the times in which he lived, that is, as a relatively
simple, one-dimensional hierarchical structure of subject categories with the most general subjects
at the top of the structure and the most concrete categories at the lowest levels of the structure.”
Miksa continues by reflecting on the challenges faced by the DDC in assimilating to the post-
modern age, in which information environments are becoming personalized spaces and in
which assertions of truth are considered relative.
Among his suggestions for how the DDC should respond to these changes are:
1. Provision for various levels of specification so institutions and individuals can choose
their desired level; and
2. Provision of alternative arrangements based on different citation orders. In order to achieve
these purposes, Miksa notes that effort will be needed “to discover new hidden patterns of
relationships among categories and sequences of categories so that these new patterns
might be applied elsewhere.”
Fortunately, such efforts would build on fundamental characteristics of the system.
1. The hierarchical structure of the system supports varying levels of specification; based on
this, research efforts in machine-assisted derivation of the abridged edition have already
been reported.

2. Because of the manner in which DDC numbers for complex topics are built (that is, the
appending of notational segments that represent topic components), citation order is
expressed in the notation.
The principle of maintaining the integrity of the notation militates against generating notational
variants that adopt alternative citation orders. However, there is no stricture against alternative
(even user-customized) displays that organize complex topics in ways that mirror alternative
citation orders. Generating such displays could take advantage of information recorded in the
765 (Synthesized number components) field of the MARC authority format. It should be noted
in a related vein that the 085 field in the MARC bibliographic format has recently been enhanced
to support retrieval on the notational components that correspond to facets.
All the hierarchical relationships referred to thus far are generic-specific relationships, where a
simple subject is made more specific through the addition of attributes associated with its
semantic type: for example, red oaks are more specific than oaks. But specification in classification
systems can also rely on the combination of two or more subjects of different semantic types
(i.e., from different facets). For instance, jazz songs, a subject which combines form and genre,
can be treated as a specification of jazz or as a specification of vocal music. In the DDC such
subjects are typically expressed through number building; that is, a complex subject is reflected
by appending notation that represents one subject to the base notation that represents another
subject.
The DDC notation for jazz songs, 782.42165, reflects a combination of 782.42 Secular songs
+165 Jazz (from 781.65). Batty (1976, 3) suggests that with the process of number building, seen
in rudimentary form in even the first edition, Dewey made one of his greatest contributions.
He describes the model thus: “the recognition of the characteristic aspects of the subject, the
separate listing of those aspects in general-to-specific order, the availability of the detail from
general aspect to divide the specific aspects further, the consequent assembly order of specific
aspects divided by general aspects, and the mnemonic effect of the consistent use of simple
notation from the two aspects.” And it all takes place within and dovetails with hierarchically
expressive notation.

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