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Dewey 2 Me 1 More Time

September 10, 2009
In Dewey news:
Recently, I discovered the beta version of Classify from OCLC Research.

Classify is a prototype service designed to support the assignment of classification numbers for books, DVDs, CDs, and many other types of materials.

Search by ISBN, ISSN, UPC, OCLC number, or author/title. The service offers access to more than 36 million WorldCat records containing Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Library of Congress Classification (LCC), or National Library of Medicine (NLM) Classification numbers.  It shares the most frequent and most recent class numbers, and it links to DeweyBrowser for further cataloging information.

(This is going to come in very handy for the many gift books that arrive unclassified.)

In other exciting DDC news, our friends at OCLC recently announced the launch of Dewey.info.  It's a handy little tool--a terminology service--that helps make a little more sense of the top three levels of  the DDC (in nine languages), as well as share and keep up to date with any changes in the world of classification.

Dewey.info is a new

platform for Dewey data on the Web, a place to start a dialogue and exchange of ideas with the Linked Data community.

Among the project's goals:

Did you ever run into a Dewey number, say 641, and want to know (or let your users know) what this number stood for? Now you can use a regular browser and use the following URL: http://dewey.info/class/641/. This URL as an identifier stands for class “641” in the DDC and redirects a regular Web browser automatically to HTML representations of all available versions of this class in all available languages (http://dewey.info/class/641/about). The “/about” part indicates that this URL stands for a general description of the abstract concept (i.e., Dewey class 641), not the concept itself. The concept itself—as an abstract thing or idea—does not have a representation that can be sent over the Web, so the Web server points the user agent to a place on the Web where a description of that thing can be found.

Though Dewey.info does not offer the depth that most libraries require for organizing a collection--we still need the books or the subscription service for that--it offers three significant benefits:

• Provides a logical system for organizing every item in your library’s unique collection
• Offer library users familiarity and consistency of a time-honored classification system used in 200,000 libraries worldwide
• Integrate updates to the DDC almost as soon as they happen through quarterly, electronic updates to WebDewey and Abridged WebDewey

Dewey.info is intended as a first step. According to David Bigwood's Catalogablog:

The intention of dewey.info is to be a platform for Dewey data on the web; more is to come in terms of languages, deeper data, and links to other datasets. The DDC has been widely used as a knowledge organization tool, and the way the URIs have been set up should allow the construction of links based on existing metadata in resource descriptions like bibliographic records.

This stuff may keep getting easier.  Let's keep watching.

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on September 10, 2009 | Comments (1)