You ditched Dewey and replaced it with what exactly?
Karen Schneider gives us the facts that have been missing from the media handwringing about the Maricopa County Library District’s switch from Dewey to BISAC. Go read it, understand what they did and the good and bad outcomes from their decision.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:22
[…] I have to say when I hit “publish” for my Techsource post about post-Deweyfication last night I had no idea it would have 8 comments by this morning. I attribute that to Jessamyn’s link love, and thanks, gal. […]
July 25th, 2007 at 1:25
Wait a minute, I’m supposed to read the facts and consider the Maricopa County’s research-based decision to drop Dewey instead of blindly raging? Where’s the fun in that?
July 25th, 2007 at 5:16
Sometimes it takes a child… Visit http://www.kidsclick.org , a kid’s search engine. They have a neat little link at the bottom you can click on to see “What does this page look like through a Librarian’s Eyes?” Toggle back and forth and ponder the debate.
July 26th, 2007 at 8:43
I’m sorry, but acting like librarians think totally in Dewey is silly. We’re much more likely to use the same kidsclick version as the kids. Most of us use Dewey as a shelving mechanism to locate a specific book, but think of a whole section as “Education” or “Medical” or “Travel.” If you put big signs with those words over the appropriate areas and tell people that the Dewey number is just there as a sort of address when you’re in a hurry to quickly tell you exactly where on a shelf a book should be, I think you have the best of both worlds.
I wouldn’t tell the 911 system they had to stop using addresses because most people who came to an area just wanted to browse and shop and didn’t care exactly what the street address of the stores were. Different people have different needs, and there’s no reason you can’t design for both.