Unlike Dewey’s rigid structure, Bliss provides more flexibility to the classifier, allowing alternative locations to suit the library. Like the Dewey Decimal System, Bliss aims to be a universal classification, capable (at least in theory) of finding a place for any book on any subject. Queens’ is one of 5 Cambridge college libraries using Bliss, and fewer than 20 libraries use the system at all. Queens’ War Memorial Library is classified using the Bliss Bibliographic Classification, named for the devisor of the 1940 first edition, Henry Evelyn Bliss, though much was changed in the currently used 1977 second edition. This blog post discusses some of the issues we have spotted, some changes we have made, and some problems still to tackle. As part of our efforts towards decolonisation, we have taken some steps to rectify this, but there is still much more to do. Eurocentricity and imperialism permeate the classification in the War Memorial Library, and vestigial racism lingers on in certain places. However, the systems used to classify libraries are often slow to change, with their terminology and hierarchies betraying the prejudices and biases of their conception’s sociohistorical context. Our recent survey of Queens’ students found that around a quarter of undergraduates browse library shelves to find books to read for their studies, and so, consciously or otherwise, interact with classification systems. The outcome: a singular, linear sequence guiding readers through the universe of knowledge. This possibility for serendipitous discovery comes from a process of classification: defining a book’s subject and representing it with a brief, alphanumeric code. When librarians enthuse about classification systems to those uninitiated in the profession, there is not a small chance they will be met with words to the effect of “who cares?” Yet, as American journalist Susan Orlean reminisces, a reader with classmark in hand scanning library shelves for the matching letters and numbers from the catalogue they recently jotted down (or more likely today, screenshotted) will often happily encounter related neighbouring books they might have never heard of and did not know they wanted. On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.” Susan Orlean, The Library Book (Atlantic, 2019) “I knew what it was like to want a book and to buy it, but I had forgotten what it felt like to amble among the library shelves, finding the book I was looking for but also seeing who its neighbors were, noticing their peculiar concordance, and following an idea as it was handed off from one book to the next, like a game of telephone.
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