I’ve been reading quite a bit of the history of classification recently, now that I have some breathing room and some focus.

Kathryn and I agreed that I should focus on the literature that I identified during Pauline’s Classification Seminar (CS) earlier in the semester. So, I’ve been organizing what I had already photocopied and copying even more. I’ve also started reading through what I’m amassing.

This literature has its own special problems of interpretation. There are many claims about computers and their limits, one way or the other, that one must be aware may be vastly different today.

Pauline suggested an article in CS that I have found immensely useful: Thomas, Angela R. S. “New Roles for Classification in Libraries and Information Networks: An Excerpt Bibliography.” Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 21 (2), 1995: 91-118.

It has turned out to be an incredibly productive article. I used a bit of the stuff in it for my presentations in CS, but most of my stuff was newer for those. Most of the stuff in the bibliography was just interesting to me. So I have recently read a fair amount of the following historical conference proceedings:

Allerton Park Institute Number Six. “The Role of Classification in the Modern American Library.” Papers Presented at an Institute conducted by The University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science, November 1-4, 1959.

There was some serious happenings in the year of my birth. Mortimer Taube, in “Classification Today — Shadow or Substance,” (31-41) says:

We must admit in the beginning that the concern of librarianship with problems of classification represents one of the oldest and strongest links of librarianship with basic intellectual and theoretical questions. As a first year student in library school many years ago, John Lund and I found that questions of classification constituted an intellectual oasis in a barren waste of learning how many spaces should go between the author and title in descriptive cataloging, or how one collates a book when the publisher has gotten mixed up in his numbering procedure. Hence, the earliest contribution I attempted to make to the art or science of librarianship was a paper on classification. Some of you may have read it. It was called “A Non-Expansive Classification System” and it appeared in the Library Quarterly over twenty years ago. In this paper we took the line that a classification system covering all knowledge for all time was certainly chimerical or, as the title assigned to me has it, “shadowy.” …

In the twenty years that have elapsed since this paper, I have seen no reason to weaken its conclusions but I am now convinced that Dr. Lund and I did not go far enough. At that time we did recognize a changing pattern of literature. What we overlooked were the different interests which might exist in the same historical epoch. Now we would say that not only is it necessary to make classifications for different periods of time but that it is necessary to make classifications for different special purposes (32-33).

Amen!

Jesse Shera, in “What Lies Ahead in Classification,” 116-128, says:

But the discoveries of recent decades shattered forever their comfortable little world – a world which will not be tolerated again. Because the evolution of man’s knowledge is not a predictable and finite process, because a field of endeavor may never properly be regarded as closed, and hence because classification can never be seriously advanced with a pretense of ultimacy, we have come at times to question whether anything useful can be gained by attempts at classification, especially since the Unified-Science movement tends to obliterate distinction among the disciplines. But the permanence of any one system of classification is not a valid measure of the utility of classification per se, and it has nothing whatever to do with classification as a mode of human thought (117).

Allerton Park Institute Number 21. “Major Classification Systems: The Dewey Centennial.” Papers presented at the Allerton Park Institute sponsored by … held November 9-12, 1975, edited by Kathryn Luther Henderson.

Advances in Knowledge Organization, Vol. 1 (1990). “Tools for Knowledge Organization and the Human Interface.” Proceedings 1st International ISKO-Conference, Darmstadt, 14-17 August 1990, organized by the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), edited by Robert Fugmann. Franfurt/Main: Indeks Verlag, 1990.

More on these other proceedings later. Plus, there’s Vol. 2 of ISKO to photocopy still. I’ve also been reading stuff for Allen’s Information Modeling. Maybe I’ll report on some of it. I have another marked exercise for his class, though, first.