Maria O’Hara (Reading List Services Support Co-Ordinator) outlines why we need to question the existing structures of the Library, namely our classification system -Dewey Decimal – a sy…

Carl Linnaeus, the father of biological taxonomy, also had a hand in inventing this tool for categorizing anything.

By: Valerie Nye  Several months ago, as I was preparing to write for this blog, I sent out emails to listservs asking librarians to tell me about recent intel

As libraries explore new avenues of information access, the need for a critical evaluation of our bibliographic tools is more important than ever. With the potential of the emerging semantic web and the promise of linked data, how will systems originally designed to organize closed physical collections translate to an increasingly fragmented digital information space? How will deep-seated cultural biases affect access to a cross-cultural information environment? This paper will review the work of Sandy Berman’s Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People aiming to explore a critical framework to evaluate the cultural interoperability of library classification and subject heading systems in a broader information landscape.

AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

Student activists are to thank for the change

A 3 x 5 history of the cards that helped catalog all of human knowledge in a way anybody could use.

In a December blog posting, I expressed surprise that the longest DDC Edition 23 numbers I could locate in our database or in WorldCat that are palindromes—the numbers read the same forwards or backwards—were "only" 7 digits long. We declared...

Here is the text from my talk at the CUNY Graduate Center on Feb. 5, 2016 as part of a panel discussion entitled “Ideas in Circulation: Open Scholarship for Social Justice.” You can fol…

Start of Berman's crusade: racial slur "kafir" used as LCSH.

The newest edition of Apple's music software is bad news for anyone who prefers plain, old MP3s.

Dewey numbers for LGBTI topics have been and at times continue to be homophobic, reflecting the society and times in which the numbers are developed, from the nineteenth century to present. Melvil Dewey, a man so obsessed with efficiency he shortened the spelling of his first name and considered spelling his surname as ‘Dui’, invented Dewey decimal classification in 1876. Given the nineteenth century origins of DDC, many have noted the inherent cultural bias including a Christian concentration, racism, sexism and homophobia.

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A number of years ago, a young man came to the reference desk with a question for the Social Science, Philosophy & Religion department librarians. He asked me why books about gay men were next to the shelves with incest and sexual bondage books. He said that wasn't how he was at all. His face showed deep hurt and from his expression, I read that as a gay man who came of age in the 21st century, he had never experienced the kind of marginalization, ostracization, and ridicule I had seen my friends fight when I was his age.

Serendipity in the library stacks is generally regarded as a positive occurrence. While acknowledging its benefits, this essay draws on research in library science, information systems, and other fields to argue that, in two important respects, this form of discovery can be usefully framed as a problem. To make this argument, the essay examines serendipity both as the outcome of a process situated within the information architecture of the stacks and as a user perception about that outcome.

Netflix using user tagging and behavior to classify movies.

On discovery breaking out of the prison of original order via linked data and digitization.