Doc Edward Morbius ⭕<p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@JoBlakely" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>JoBlakely</span></a></span> It's called "library science".</p><p>And therein lie conflicts, beliefs, irreconcilable differences, religions, and civil wars.</p><p>I'd hashtagged Paul Otlet, who made this his life's work in the early 20th century, culminating in a vast index-card driven database in Belgium, the Mundaneum, ultimately destroyed by the Nazis in WWII.</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otl</span><span class="invisible">et</span></a></p><p>Amongst bibliographic standards, there's the Dublin Core (named after the city in Ohio, not Ireland), which attempts to describe a set of common and useful metadata attributes, though it's been criticised on numerous grounds:</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_C</span><span class="invisible">ore</span></a></p><p>The US Library of Congress has its own systems, notably the LoC Classification and LoC Subject Headings. Otlet himself came up with the Decimal Classification. (Both LoC and Otlet based their work significantly on that of Melville Dewey, though LoC also inherited Thomas Jefferson's personal book classification structure, as it was Jefferson's collection which initiated the Library of Congress, and if you're interested in <em>that</em>, there are about a century and a half of Librarian's Reports to Congress which detail the history of how that collection (and its physical infrastructure) developed: <a href="https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/</span><span class="invisible">000072049</span></a> with recent editions (past 20 or so years) at the LoC itself: <a href="https://www.loc.gov/about/reports-and-budgets/annual-reports/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">loc.gov/about/reports-and-budg</span><span class="invisible">ets/annual-reports/</span></a>)</p><p>A key point that's often forgotten is that <em>metadata serves users' and archivists' needs</em>, and <strong>NOT</strong> the interests of authors or publishers. This gives rise to two major issues:</p><ul><li><p>Self-classification or description (including full-text -search-based-access as is common online) elevates <em>author</em> and <em>publisher</em> interests over <em>readers</em>. SEO, spam, and clickbait are amongst the highly predictable outcomes of this.</p></li><li><p>Reader and archivist concerns <strong>change with time</strong>. It's pretty fascinating to look at various Global Classifications Of All Knowledge over time, dating to, say, Aristotle and earlier, but notably Francis and Roger Bacon (no relation), Denis Diderot, Voltaire, etc. Encyclopedia organisational systems especially are a pretty fascinating insight.</p></li></ul><p>The US LoC is criticised for being US-centric, and anchored in 19th (and 18th) century thinking. Both points are absolutely true, but they're also a reflection of <em>where the collection originated and who it served</em>. In particular, some idosyncracies (the vast sections of History devoted to the US and Americas, relative to the Rest Of the World, say), reflect the actual physical collection and the fact that <em>most of the history books included</em> covered those regions.</p><p>The Librarian's letters beginning around the turn of the 20th century address expansion and revision of the classification system. I've spent a lot of time going through it, and find a few interesting bits such as, say, the legal classification of state law, which is utterly dominated by two states in particular: New York and California. (Several other mostly north-eastern / industrial states are also relatively large.) Again: that's where the interesting detail happens to lie.</p><p>And yes, religion, culture, social groups and movements, etc., are all subject to various forms of abuse, neglect, and/or revision over time. To that extent I find the LoC's classifications <em>in that the have evolved mechanisms to adapt to change over time</em> particularly commendable. Not perfection, but moving toward it, most of the time.</p><p><a href="https://toot.cat/tags/Libraries" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Libraries</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/Librarians" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Librarians</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/LibraryOfCongress" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>LibraryOfCongress</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/Cataloging" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cataloging</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/Catalogs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Catalogs</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/ClassificationSystems" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClassificationSystems</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/DocumentManagement" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DocumentManagement</span></a> <a href="https://toot.cat/tags/Metadata" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Metadata</span></a></p>