Friday 2 January 2009

Wrapped up in cataloguing books

We started in on the books today, testing out how to proceed with the book section of the Mighty Liberry. We're taking a very different approach to books, as we're using the "actual" Dewey numbers rather than ones we're making up cuz we think they're funny.

The way that proper libraries catalogue media items is, to us, pretty boring and far too restrictive. We thought it'd be way kool to approach cds as if they were about certain things. This quickly turned into making puns about their titles, because it's much easier than trying to work out what the overall themes of an album are. Otherwise we were doomed to buying concept albums for the rest of our lives. Music cds are generally put into the 780s, where the rest of music (as a subject) resides. Within the 780 division, the sections are pretty broad, making distinctions like 781 (General principles and musical forms), and 782 (Vocal music). Getting down into different genres of music, you can get into sub-divisions like 781.64 (Western popular music), as opposed to 781.66 (Rock (rock and roll)). So, while "correct", not the most exciting of classification systems.

There is also some variation/inconsistency (depending on your view) in classification, even between items by the same artist. For example, works by Brian Eno are classified in the QUT Library under a few call numbers.

With books, we want to actually be able to find things. And while it was fun making up Dewey numbers for albums, the thought of making up call numbers from scratch for all our books is daunting. And besides, books actually have subjects, so our amateurish fumbling would probably embarass the books.

We've entered 6 books so far. Tellico allows us to search Amazon by ISBN and download the data from there, then we input the extra stuff we want. We're using two methods to pin down call numbers for our books.


  1. The call number suggestion on the edition notice. Who are we to argue with what the book wants?
  2. Scavenging through different library catalogues to see what they're using. Sometimes we find slight disparity between the entries in different libraries' catalogues. I don't think we've quite come up with a way of working out which library's word we're gonna rely on yet.


We're also keeping a record of which library catalogue we've cribbed the call number from, what the Dewey taxonomy for that number is, and what the library's subject headings are for that entry.

Of course, we are using schedules from 1989. The recent revision maybe is a bit more hip?

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