USING CLASSIFICATION IN TEACHING INDEXING
| Date | 01 April 1965 |
| Pages | 279-286 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026379 |
| Published date | 01 April 1965 |
| Author | J. MILLS |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
USING CLASSIFICATION IN TEACHING INDEXING
J. MILLS
Library
School,
University
of Maryland
THE STATUS of cataloguing and classification, Siamese twins if ever there
were
such,
has
undergone some sharp
ups
and downs in Britain and America
in the past generation. Until the beginning of the post-war period, for ex-
ample, we had in Great Britain the extraordinary situation whereby an ex-
haustive examination in the pair was the
sole
content of the
basic
chartering
examination for librarians. By successive revisions of their examination
syllabus, the Library Association reduced the emphasis on the subject until
a point was reached when, by the operation of exemptions, a graduate
entrant could become a chartered librarian without having had any sus-
tained instruction in the fundamentals of cataloguing and classification as
such.
At the same time, in the United States, its eminence dating back to the
early days of the thrusting Dewey and the retiring but no
less
potent Cutter
had continued to decline. Dewey's advocacy of the classified catalogue was
finally unsuccessful in the face of Cutter and the introduction of the Library
of Congress card
service
for dictionary catalogues at the turn of the century.
Since then, classification in the narrow and popular sense had become a
synonym for mere shelf arrangement. The study of author/tide problems
appeared to get into a rut in which a thousand petty examples obscured the
fundamental principles at
issue.
The scepticism of librarians trained in such
an atmosphere was reflected in attempts to put classification and cataloguing
into their
places,
as in the renaming of the
Journal
of
Cataloguing and
Classi-
fication. Whilst the pair continued to dominate the newly described area
(library resources and technical services) the impression of diminished
stature remained for many.
It is likely that
a
central element responsible for the difficulties commonly
associated with the subject was a failure to apply the analytical discipline of
classification itself to
the
problems of presentation. An outstanding example
was the failure to classify the limited number of situations which give rise
to problems of deciding authorship and of deciding the style in which to
state a particular class of author (e.g., those who have changed their name).
In classification
itself,
this failure led to a mechanical view of the subject, in
which indexing was identified with the process of interpreting (and perhaps
279
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