Library Classification Systems

[swestrup]

I have belatedly realized that part of the problem I've been having lately in finding things in my digitized collection of books is that I don't have a consistent classification system for them. Thus I often don't find something I'm looking for. This has lead to me getting multiple digitizations of the same book in my library, and not getting digital versions of other books I have in hardcopy.  (My eventual goal is to have a digital backup of every book I own.)

So, now I'm looking into library classifications so that I can give consistent call numbers to every digital book I own, and then find them again. To achieve this, I have a fair number of desiderata:

1. It would help greatly if there were an online catalog available so that I could look up the classification codes of all my books, rather than having to manually work through a rules set to assign them. The only one I know is the LCC (Library of Congress Classification) but there must be others.
   
2. I want the end results to be reasonably organized and handy for browsing through. This is a vote against the LCC.
   
3. I'm not about to pay a licensing fee to organize my books, so I need to use a system that is completely open. This eliminates both the Universal Decimal and Dewey Decimal systems.
4. Although its not necessary, I tend towards the idea of a faceted system as I have no trouble with books being in multiple 'virtual bookshelves' at the same time.

So far, given all of the above, I'm drawing a complete blank and so I'm still using my current ad-hoc system, but I'd sure like to get a bit more organized in my book classification.

Comments

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

(1) The colon classification originated facets, as far as I know. The book that defined it is out-of-print, unless there's been a reprint in the last twenty years or so. I have a photocopy of much of it, if you like. It's the one I've used for my own books, to the extend I've classified it at all. It is somewhat out-of-date for technical matters. I tried classifying my records with it, and Gwen rebelled and rearranged them in alphabetifal order by artist. Or composer. Or whatever.

(2) The Bliss classification is the one that has gone for facets whole hog. Every classification code is a facet, and you classify a book by concatenating its facets in alphabetical order. It looks nice. I have no idea whether it is available online.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

You might consider the classificateion for web pages used by dmoz.org. That one appears to be a tree structure with cross-links. If your file system uses symbolic links, it might fit fairly well.

You'd have to improvise it you have a huge amounf of files in one of their finest-grain classifications, though.

I wonder how long a web-crawl though their index to extract all the classifications would take (ignoring the content itself). But you probably won't need the whole thing all at once anyway.

[swestrup]

The Colon classification system seems not to good at handling technical books, which is a good 75% of my library. I've yet to read up enough on Bliss to know if its worth using, but I've already seen one article that says that analyzing a book into all of its facets for Bliss is extremely time consuming, so unless I can look up my books in a Bliss database, this seems a non-starter.

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

The colon classification may be OK for technical stuff anno 1960 or such, but it hasn't been kept up to date. Is there a community of users online that are trying to maintian it? I haven't looked. I do know that there was an attempt a few decades ago to classify a software library using its principles. The colon classification books seem to have been republished recently The colon classification book itself seems to be for sale for $32US.

It's not clear to me what the chances are of finding it or putting it on a wiki or something similar to make it seriously updatable. I suspect it may be protected by copyright. Then again, the rights may be owned by some foundation that would welcome something like that.

I don't have experience with Bliss. But I have read through the classification guide, and I don't consider it all that daunting. In any case, a facetized classification would nowadays seem to be better placed in a database than a hierarchical classification. The hierarchy might still belong within each facet, but multiple facets ahould result in multiple classification that you conjoin in a database query.

[swestrup]

Ideally, what I want to end up with is all of my books organized into some sort of subject hierarchy, presumably by hierarchical decomposition of some primary facet. The books would be named with a full classification number, and indexed by a database that understood the classification system.

[sps.livejournal.com]

You might ask Pat if she knows of anything....

[swestrup]

I was thinking of that, but I've long since lost touch with her. I don't have an email address or anything.

[angorian.livejournal.com]

Not sure how helpful it is for digital books, but I love LibraryThing.

[swestrup]

LibraryThing actually has an ongoing program to create just the kind of classification system that I need. Its only just gotten started though, and probably won't be very usable for a few more years yet.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I've looked up books at archives.ca in the past; they have Dewey and LC as well as ISBNs and whatnot.