Page 8 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 1: Concept of Library Classification

Notes

Notes A popular way of putting works about the same subject in roughly the same place
on the shelf. Even if you don’t find the book you were looking for, you’ll be in the
neighbourhood of other books on related topics.

Alphabetic lists of subject headings can also serve as a basis of arrangement, as for pamphlets
and leaflets in the vertical files of public libraries. More often, they are used as finding aids to
material arranged by some other principle. They may be simple or complex. In their fully
developed form, they have “scope notes” and several kinds of cross references, are keyed to a
classification system, and use a controlled vocabulary with standard terms. Subject catalogues in
general libraries are of this type. They are based on, or taken entirely from, either Sears’ List of
Subject Headings or the Library of Congress Subject Headings List.

A simpler type of subject heading list, the keyword index, uses the words found in the documents
instead of standard terms, and is more adapted to the use of computerized information retrieval.
There are no keyword indexes in this supplement because they are each tailor-made for the
body of information they index.

Published, pre-existing classifications and lists of subject headings are not useful for conservation
or other special subject libraries, for a number of reasons. They scatter conservation among too
many major categories, define terms too broadly, lack significant smaller subject categories,
include only terms applicable to entire books, and so on.

!

Caution The alternative is to make up one’s own system from scratch, which is a very time-
consuming job, or to adapt a system used in a similar library.

1.1.1 Library of Congress Classification

A classification system developed and used at the Library of Congress since 1897, the Library of
Congress (LC) Classification system divides the field of knowledge into twenty large classes with
an additional class on general works. This notation allows more combinations and greater
specificity without long notations. The Law Library, Music Library and Asian Library use LC
classification schemes for all or part of their collections.

Most of the libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign use the Dewey call
number system; you are probably familiar with these call numbers from their widespread use
in public libraries. A few University of Illinois libraries, however - e.g., Asian, Law, and
Music - use another system for organizing materials called the Library of Congress (LC) system.
The LC system originated in the Library of Congress, a private library for senators and
representatives in Washington, to organize materials on shelves. In recent decades, as LC has
made its records available electronically, more libraries have adopted LC for both shelving and
cataloguing. Once an item is LC catalogued, you will need to understand the number to retrieve
the physical item you have selected.

1.1.2 Nature of Classification

You can organize information by classifying it. Classification is a means of bringing order to a
multiplicity of concepts or items of information, by arranging them into classes – dividing the
universe of information (that is: all recorded knowledge) into manageable and logical portions.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 3