Mon Dewey!

[steepholm]

They're doing a stock review at my university's library. Amongst the class marks up for culling are:

305.3 Gender and also men
305.4 Women including feminism
305.90664 Lesbians and Gay men

Admittedly this has the look of a piecemeal, evolving, much-tinkered-with system, rather than something anybody's thought up from scratch, but even so - who could find in this a satisfactory approximation to reality? John Wilkins would be spinning.

Comments

[gair.livejournal.com]

That's fantastic!

[gair.livejournal.com]

Though of course lesbians are not women.* I think gay men are men, though (although I met an awesome gay medievalist who referred to himself as an 'old boy' - actually, where is the classmark for 'boy'???).

*(c) (TM) Monique Wittig, though it works better in French where the word for 'woman' is the same as the word for 'wife'.

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

Un homme sur deux est une femme!

You know, that never occurred to me about Wittig's statement, and it really should have. Thinky!

[gair.livejournal.com]

that never occurred to me about Wittig's statement

I know! Someone used it as a put-down in an argument with me (Chuh, I've read Wittig in FRENCH, you know, and she meant WIVES), which wasn't the most fun way to find out, but it did make a lightbulb go on over my head...

[dru-marland.livejournal.com]

'wife' originally was happy to mean 'woman' or wife', though so long ago as to be scarce worth mentioning, except that it reminded me of the story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard, in which Cynewulf, having been deprived of his kingdon 'for unright deeds', is surprised at Merton, whither he has been engaged in 'wifcyþþing'; 'þone cyning lytle werode on wifcyþþe on Merantune' - 'the king was in Merton, having womansex, with inadequate protection...'

a library cataloger explains, or tries to

[calimac.livejournal.com]

It took me a few days before I could check this against the actual Dewey classification (we don't use Dewey where I work), and let me assure you: this is NOT standard Dewey terminology and probably never has been. It is an artifact of the local library's collapsing together multiple levels of the Dewey hierarchy.

In any case, labels like these, even if more accurately formulated, are not intended to be used or even seen by library patrons. That's what subject headings are for.

Dewey moved social groups (including gender) into 305 with the 1979 edition, at which point 305.3 was men and 305.4 was women. However, there came to be so many books about the relationship between the sexes, not about one or the other, that 305.3 was later changed to gender issues, while the subordinate space of 305.31-305.39 continued to be used for books about men or groups of men. Thus your library's misleading tag of "Gender and also men" for the total 305.3x class.

"Women and also feminism" means simply that social issues involving women - which is where books on feminism would go - are at 305.42, and since feminism is an important topic, your library chose to particularly note that it goes under the broader 305.4 class, lest anybody be uncertain as to whether it belonged there or somewhere else.

As for "Lesbians and gay men" being separate from either, this too is misleading. The rest of 305 is for people classed in other ways than by sex, and 305.906 is for persons classed by things like marital status or sexual orientation. Books about single or married or divorced or widowed people as such would go here, and 305.90662 is for books about heterosexuals (as such), 305.90663 for bisexuals, and 305.90664 for gays. (And that's the terminology in the schedule: "gays".) Underneath that, 305.906642 is specifically for books about gay men and 305.906643 is for books about lesbians.

Now, it would be possible to use the tables to create numbers for gay men and lesbians under 305.3 and 305.4. But the makers of Dewey decided it would make more sense to keep those books with the ones about gay people in general, rather than those about men and women divided up in other ways. And I daresay people who want books about gays find this convenient.

Please remember three things about library classification:

1. It is not a pigeonholing of the people or things whose names are on the classification, but a tool for labeling books about specific subjects.

2. That the purpose of this labeling is not to create hierarchies (that's an artificial effect of the notational system), but to put books on the shelf next to other books on the most closely related topics.

3. That the length of the notation has nothing to do with the importance of the subject (that'd be clear if you look at the numbers that books on computing get), but is a result of the fact that, Dewey being a pure numerical system, the numbering space is very tight.

Re: a library cataloger explains, or tries to

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for taking the time to explain, calimac: that's very illuminating.