I have worked with K-12 libraries for over a decade. As an executive for a library data and services company, I have had the privilege of working with school districts in their efforts to improve library services. I have also been party to some wonderful projects and experiments on the issue of improving a library’s effectiveness in terms of curriculum integration and one study, which simply looked at how to get children to read a book.

To get to my point – DDC is hardly the problem in terms of getting children – of any age, to become life-long readers. For a child that has discovered the love for reading, the shelving of materials is only a problem when the materials are not aligned to the OPAC. Even then, avid readers are very creative (and demanding!) in finding the materials they are interested in – the DDC is a small hiccup at worst.

And it’s not the DDC that is keeping non readers from becoming readers.

What is keeping non readers from our libraries and thus ‘killing them’ is the simple fact that most schools do not proactively engage their students in the act of reading library materials. ( A case studies will be out soon, I hope but it is a statewide study – A school district of 68 schools mostly Title I, 70% fail rate in state testing for reading, science had very well equipped libraries. Data showed that on average, 65% of all students checked out less than 2 books in their K-12 career. 20% had no record of being in a library. The district mandated that each student at every level must check out at least 1 book per month. 4 years later, the districts reading test scores passed at an 85% rate. The schools that were already making the test grades, had the highest circulation rates – attributed to librarians who with administrative support, proactively engaged students to read…)

Next dagger – most libraries do not proactively engage their curriculum colleagues to utilize library materials in ways meaningful to daily curricula being taught.

This conversation is academically interesting and companies such as mine would appreciate the business that would come from the wholesale relabeling of books and the editing of electronic data. A better method than DDC? Better ways are not always the best ways when bridled by pragmatism; nixing DDC is moot, at least for today.

That is, I am not convinced that replacing DDC with some other taxonomy is going to get you anywhere, because I think your real problem is not the annoyances in DDC, but the fact that you are “teaching DDC” instead of “teaching information literacy”.

If you truly “agree that our focus needs to be on teaching the more general ideas of information search, retrieval, and organization,” just do it. Use DDC’s strengths and weaknesses as examples of the principles. The point is that you sholdn’t be teaching DDC per se — as I commented before, we need to make explicit the principle and the example. Older curricula probably don’t do that.

In any case, thanks for the provocative post!

I am guessing based on your responses that you (and many of the other commenters here) are not school librarians. Here is what we are facing; we have a lovely new set of standards that are focused on inquiry, knowledge generation, social sharing of information, and aesthetic growth. This is what we need to teach. This is what will prepare our students to be thinkers. Teaching DDC is a waste of time that makes us look backwards and ill-prepared for inclusion in the 21st century school. Red herrings and slippery slopes aside, we are going to teach reading and writing (and even potty training) but not DDC.

At least not in elementary schools. Beacause in elementary schools, we are working with subject limited collections with a reasonably high degree of commaonality. I did not say that each library would define a system, rather that we would look at the needs of elementary libraries; at their context and audience. For young students, a book on bulls would be under “b” because that is where students would look. Leaving aside the sarcasm, that is an idea that works for the users’ developmental level.

I certainly appreciate the input from outside of school libraries; the time for silos is well past. If school libraries continue to disappear, trust me that academic and public libraries won’t be far behind. So thanks for the thoughts, but if you just want to be negative…well, we don’t need that liked of help.

As you said yourself, David, DDC isn’t perfect. Maybe it is time we stopped settling for mediocre.

Math, reading, and writing are also broken.
Using the toilet instead of a diaper requires potty training, but I think it is well worth it.

“We cannot – indeed must not – waste our time teaching anything that cannot be shown to have a direct impact on the preparation of students for success in college and careers.”

That is truly one of the most depressing visions of education that I have ever seen.
But, even so, being able to learn to navigate complex, non-intuitive systems seems to me to be a pretty useful skill.

“The basis of the new system I would suggest needs to be the basic concept of ‘Don’t make me think!’”
An inspiring new vision for library services.

Look, the DDC has plenty of problems, and it may be possible to create better systems. What really concerns me is the idea that there is some system that just makes sense.
There isn’t.
If you have a large book collection, or music, or films, or whatever, spend a couple hours developing an organizational system that makes sense. Then take that system to someone else’s collection, and organize it for them.

Even in your own system, if you are honest with yourself, it won’t work most of the time. You arrange your movies into categories of drama, comedy, horror, etc. and then decide you want to watch movies staring a certain actor. Or movies in French. Or new movies.

You complain that animals are split between wild animals, and domestic animals. Yes, that is inconvenient if you want to browse all the books on animals, but if you only want. It makes no sense, until you are doing a project on farm animals. Then you have to think (Oops, system broken!) about what animals are on the farm.

Or:

Kid: I want books on mean, big angry bulls.
Librarian: All our animals books are listed alphabetically.
Kid: So, bulls are under B!
Librarians: No.
Kid: This is stupid.

It is very very tempting to wave these away saying that the details can be worked out later, once we all agree that the system needs an overhaul. But these details are all there is.

“Depends on the context and audience” is fine, but the context and audience changes with every single interaction with the system.

Making choices for the collection based on the programs and needs of the specific school is nice, but how many school librarians have the time, interest and expertise to re-invent that particular wheel? What we need is a ‘good enough’ general system that works decently well in virtually every context. Something like the DDC.

Now I am certainly not a taxonomer, so these are just some thoughts to get things flowing, but I would think that most of the questions raised here can be answered by considering the context and audience. Would a Mr. Rogers book about being mad be under “m” for mad or “e” for emotions? Depends on the context and audience. If you have a larger character education program, then i would suggest that there be a secondary level domain called emotions and under that grouping you would place the book under “m” for mad if that was the title (don’t confuse elementary students) or perhaps under “a” for anger if that is the common vocabulary word being used in the classrooms.

I think stevenb might have been joking, but I would actually agree with the usefulness of just going with shelving by accession number. Maybe then we would have to get a clue about our OPACs! If you think I bring a passionate polemic about DDC (and yes I do, for the reason that it gets conversation going, but trust me, I am willing to work too) then don’t get me started on the sorry state of our catalogs. Only I already fixed that for my libraries with http://fish4info.org