Manual of Library Economy: Third and Memorial EditionBrown, James Duff
Science
Manual of Library Economy: Third and Memorial Edition
Brown, James Duff
Libraries -- Great Britain -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.; Library science -- Great Britain -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
---- Short Course in Bibliographical Classification with reference to
the Decimal and Subject Systems. 1913. Library Association.
For articles, see Cannons, H 1-108, Classification.
CHAPTER XVI
SYSTEMATIC CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES
=235. General.=--Quite a large number of classification schemes have
been devised by Continental, American and British librarians, in which
books are systematically arranged according to related topics, and
marked with a notation which enables any book or subject to be
distinguished by its number, for purposes of shelving, charging and
cataloguing. All the best known of such schemes are described in Brown’s
_Library Classification and Cataloguing_, London, 1912, and Richardson’s
_Classification_, 1912. It will be sufficient to name the methods of
Harris, Perkins and Smith, of America; Edwards and Sonnenschein, of
England; Bonazzi, of Italy; and Hartwig, of Germany, which, with the
well-known French scheme of Brunet, make up a very interesting
collection of international contributions to the classification of
books. None of these schemes has been adopted in more than one or two
libraries, so that their influence is not sufficiently widespread to
make any further description of their details necessary. It will be much
more helpful to librarians if the chief systems of classification are
mentioned which fulfil every requirement as regards notation and general
adaptability to library work, and have been put to the practical test of
application in a number of libraries. The systems in question are the
Decimal, Expansive, Library of Congress, and Subject, the last being
English and the three others American. They have all been extensively
adopted, and each exists as a separate printed work, with an index; a
vital part of any method of classification. Unprinted schemes, or those
of merely theoretical interest, have little practical value, and though
every librarian has his own ideas of classification, and generally
manages to graft them on to the scheme of some other person, and even to
nibble away at his original, it is the best and wisest course to adopt a
complete, printed and accessible scheme with as little modification as
possible.
=236. Decimal Classification.=--This, the most popular and widely
applied of all library schemes, was invented by Melvil Dewey in 1873-76,
and has been under revision constantly since, and is to-day in general a
very extensive and detailed scheme. As indicated by its name, the system
is divided into groups of ten, and from this results an admirable
notation of unlimited expansibility.
Its chief divisions are as follows:
000 GENERAL WORKS.
010 Bibliography.
020 Library Economy.
030 General Cyclopædias.
040 General Collections.
050 General Periodicals.
060 General Societies.
070 Newspapers.
080 Special Libraries.
090 Book Rarities.
100 PHILOSOPHY.
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