Welcome to the new wave of the future, libraries that are more like bookstores. The Perry Branch of the Gilbert Library in Maricopa County, Arizona, will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal System. The branch's 24,000-item collection will be shelved by topic, similar to the way bookstores arrange their books. Librarians of this county system say the change is long overdue because it is too confusing for people to hunt down books using a long string of numbers and letters.
The books at the Gilbert library will be organized in about 50 sections, then subsections, from sports to cooking, gardening to mysteries. For example, a book on the Civil War would be in the history neighborhood and in the U.S. section. In the catalog, the record will indicate the subject heading, and books are then alphabetized by author. So where might a biography of a sports figure go? Biography or sports?
This would definitely make a "browsing" library and information could not be quickly located. What do you think?
Susan
2 comments:
I thought the point of the Dewey Decimal system was to catagorize by subject. Isn't this re-inventing the wheel? If the large numbers are too much, why not just use smaller subsets of the numbers? It just seems more confusing to me, I may have to take a trip and see what it is like in practice.
i've been to the library, and while it's a little different than a normal trip to the library, it's pretty easy to find books.
In fact, on a whim I knew a book i wanted (author and title) and set out to find it on my own. it took a couple minutes, but i found it fairly easy, in a DDS system that would of never happened.
There is one problem I ran across and that's cross-genre books. I was talking to the staff and right now if a book could conceivably be categorized two ways, ie history/mystery or whatever, they're only going to shelve it in one area. So help via computer or librarian, who roam the floor helping people, would be needed.
All in all the world isn't ending and it sounds like from media reports it's an experiment that if it fails miserable they'll reintroduce dewey, but if it flies then their other libraries may follow suit.
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