Dewey Decimal
Based on section discussion of Cory Doctorow’s point “schemas aren’t neutral” and on a librarian friend complaining that Korea got shafted when it came to the folktale section of the Dewey Decimal system, I decided to look at the complete list of Dewey Decimal classes.
Like Nick mentioned in section, the religion section is overwhelmingly dominated by Christianity. Also, any time languages are mentioned, European languages get multiple categories (English, Other Germanic Languages, French, Spanish, Italian, Slavic, Scandinavian) while the rest of the world is stuck in the “other” category. Wikipedia, font of all knowledge, mentions that the Library of Congress system is even more US-centric than the Dewey Decimal system.
Makes you wonder what sort of systems of categorization information scientists in other countries create.
Nick Rabinowitz Said,
September 23, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
Well, following a link or two, looks like they’re (gasp!) also somewhat biased toward their own country and culture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippon_Decimal_Classification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Library_Classification
To be fair, there’s pragmatism as well as skewed world-view at work here. The LOC has a mandate to collect American documents, so it’s going to have many more of them than another library might, and needs to accommodate them in its classification. Mevil Dewey was a librarian at Amherst College when it was still primarily a Christian divinity school, so they would have had a huge number of Christian books to catalog and very few Buddhist texts. So there’s probably a balance between simply not thinking Buddhism is important, and thinking it’s not important in the context of your own collection…