Page 32 - DLIS405_INFORMATION_STORAGE_AND_RETRIEVAL

Unit 2: Library Classification

Notes
Bliss deliberately avoided the use of the decimal point because of his objection to

Dewey’s system. Instead he used capital and lower-case letters, numerals, and every typographical
symbol available on his extensive and somewhat eccentric typewriter.

In the revised edition (BC2), only capital letters are used, with numerals occasionally used for special
purposes. Here is an extract:
HJ Preventive medicine
HL Curative medicine
HLK Primary care; general practice
HLY Secondary care, aftercare

Adoption and Change

BC was not used by many North American libraries. The system was not without its flaws (vague)
(the result of being largely a one-person project), and the layout of Bliss’s text was difficult to read.
A few library schools sometimes taught the BC system to their students, but only in a minor way.
The failure of the system to catch on in North America was partly because of its internal deficiencies
but also because the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems were already well established.
The City College library continued to use Bliss’s system until 1967, when it reluctantly switched to
the Library of Congress system. It had become too expensive to train new staff members to use BC,
and too expensive to maintain in general. Much of the Bliss stacks remain, however, as no-one has
re-catalogued the books.
The case was different, however, in Britain. BC proved more popular there and also spread to other
English-speaking countries. Part of the reason for its success was that libraries in teachers’ colleges
liked the way Bliss had organized the subject areas on teaching and education. By the mid-1950s the
system was being used in at least sixty British libraries and in a hundred by the 1970s.
In 1967 the Bliss Classification Association was formed. Its first publication was the Abridged Bliss
Classification (ABC), intended for school libraries. In 1977 it began to publish and maintain a much-
improved, revised version of Bliss’s system, the Bliss Bibliographic Classification (Second Edition)
or BC2. This retains only the broad outlines of Bliss’s scheme, replacing most of the detailed notation
with a new scheme based on the principles of faceted classification. 15 of approximately 28 volumes
of schedules have so far been published.
The top level organization is:
2/9 – Generalia, Phenomena, Knowledge, Information science & technology
A/AL – Philosophy & Logic
AM/AX – Mathematics, Probability, Statistics
AY/B – General science, Physics
C – Chemistry
D – Astronomy and earth sciences
DG/DY – Earth sciences
E/GQ – Biological sciences
GR/GZ – Applied biological sciences: agriculture and ecology
H – Physical Anthropology, Human biology, Health sciences

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