Talking in the Library

Blogging the LOC: Class C

OK, I'm just going to admit straight up that this class flummoxed me a bit. In the end, much to my shame, I decided it was because I didn't really understand what "history" was. Sad, I know. But I'm a librarian, so I know my tools, and went straight to the OED to find this:

history: that branch of knowledge which deals with past events, as recorded in writings or otherwise  ascertained; the formal record of the past, esp. of human affairs or actions 

and while I was there, grabbed this:

auxiliary: subsidiary to the ordinary, additional.

Now we're properly armed. I think my confusion was rooted in the fact that there's a specific meaning for History (capital "H", because it's serious) the discipline that is distinct from history the word used casually by non-professionals. The Auxiliary Sciences of History are things that are little-h historical, but not capital-H Historical. That makes them auxiliary - extra, outside the normal, a supplement.

So what about that pesky "science" word? That's a turn-of-the-century thing too, just like the telephone etiquette bit from last week. A lot of areas of study started calling themselves "science" then, some rightly, some less so. You could just as correctly call things falling in Class C the auxiliary disciplines of history, and in fact, some people do. 

Now, as to what falls in Class C: lots of things you might think of as your grandparents' hobbies, to be honest, although legitimate scholars also study them. Old coins (numismatics), family history (genealogy), restoring antiques (archaeology) - all auxiliary sciences of history.

There are some real gems here, whether you're a big-H Historian, a little-h history buff, or just interested the esoteric things people research. One of my favorites falls in subclass CB, the history of civilization. All call numbers falling in CB156 are concerned with "Terrestrial evidence of interplanetary voyages". We have about 8 titles in that call number range in our collection, some with awesome tabloid-headline-style titles like "SPACE-GODS REVEALED".

Subclass CC is Archaeology, seemingly normal, but includes CC200-260: Bells, Campanology, Cowbells. Cowbells. Separate from just "bells". I can't tell you how happy that makes me.  First, because it's just fun to think of someone doing academic study of cowbells. And second, because it lets me close with this, the first logical co-location of the Library of Congress Classification System and Will Ferrell's hairy belly.

Did you miss earlier posts in this series? Check out the tag for more classification goodness.

C: cc licensed flickr photo by dasistdasende
numismatics: cc licensed flickr photo by dandiffendale

Blogging the LOC: Class B

Class B is one of my favorite LC classes, I have to admit.  All the psychology books, all the religion books, and some whackadoo stuff thrown in.  Also, at least in Hale Library, it's convenient.  Step out of the elevators on 4th floor, and you're staring straight at the B's. 

So, officially, Class B is Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion. Philosophy and religion seem like decently cozy bedfellows, but how did psychology get thrown in the mix?  Understanding the rationale is easier when you remember that the modern science of psychology was relatively new when the classification system was created. It had not not yet evolved into the social science with biological undertones that we know and love today.  So it got chucked in here, and occupies a very tiny space, just one subclass.  A subclass it shares, by the way, with materials about ghosts, psychics, astrology, and magic, all lumped under "parapsychology".

Another fun Class B fact reflective of the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist: there's a whole number chunk (under the Ethics subclass) reserved for materials about "telephone etiquette".

Religion occupies the whole latter section of the B's from BL onward.  Clever atheists like to make jokes about the fact that the subclass reserved for the Bible is BS, but it's unlikely, given the era, that any such slight was intended.  In fact, the relative weight, subclass-wise, that Christianity in general occupies in Class B is indicative of the lens through which Americans of the time viewed the world.  Judaism and Buddhism get a subclass each, Islam shares one with a few other faith traditions, but Christianity gets 5 subclasses. It was easier for people of the time to imagine and articulate the distinctions between fairly esoteric bits of Christianity, so they did. 

Next week, Class C, the intriguingly named "Auxiliary Sciences of History".  It's History! It's Science! Together for a limited time only. 

Old Telephone: cc licensed flickr photo by Matti Mattila  
Letter B: cc licensed flickr photo by Indy Charlie

Blogging the LOC: Class A

Last week, we began with a basic overview of the Library of Congress system used by K-State Libraries to organize all our books. If you didn't catch it, you might want to read it first. From here on out I'm going to assume you know what I'm talking about, as much as that's possible with regards to the Library of Congress system. 

So today we begin with Class A. It would be awesome if LOC started out strong, so I could say "See! It makes sense and is great!" but unfortunately that's not the case. Class A is "General Works", just a bare step above "Miscellaneous" on the hierarchy of vagueness.

What are general works? They're things that cover many subject areas at once, like Encyclopedias (subclass AE), Indexes (subclass AI), Newspapers (subclass AN) and Yearbooks (subclass AY).

Now I'm concerned that you read that previous sentence and got the wrong idea. See how everything lines up all nice? Encylopedia AE, Indexes AI, Newspapers AN, Yearbooks AY.  IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. It's like Herbert Putnam and his staff charged in, librarian guns blazing, a fierce resolve to organize burning in their souls, then got through Class A and decided to say the rest was good enough for government work. So later, you don't see those happy patterns, even when they could theoretically exist. Would it have been so hard to make "Finance" class HF, instead of HG? Apparently so. But those are concerns for later posts. 

Now, if you head up to Hale Library's 4^th floor to look at Class A, you're not going to find ton of materials.  Not because we don't appreciate a good general work, though, but because we keep so many of them in the Reference and Current Periodicals areas on 1^st floor. You'll find a few gems up there, though, including a large run of Life with ads straight out of Mad Men (in AP with other periodicals) and a gorgeous Spanish-language encyclopedia from the 1930s, Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana (in AE with other encyclopedias). 

So, one Class down, 20-ish to go. Next week, we take on Class B, the first of many classes to lump together a bunch of seemingly unrelated topics.

Letter A: cc licensed flickr photo by Leo Reynolds

Blogging the LOC: An Introduction

The start of the semester always brings at least a couple people to the Library Help Desk expressing frustration with the way our books are organized. Why isn’t all the fiction together? Why couldn’t you just put History in the “H” section? What happened to the number system I used in high school and at the public library?

This year, I’d like to explain it to you. I’ll probably get my official librarian card revoked for revealing these arcane secrets, but I think it’s worth the risk.

K-State Libraries, along with most other academic libraries, uses the Library of Congress classification system. It’s a method of grouping resources by topic, just like the Dewey Decimal numbers you’ve probably used before. It’s useful, but highly quirky. It’s a product of a particular time (the early 1900s) and a particular collection of books (those in the Library of Congress), but it’s also the best way most academic libraries have for organizing the vast numbers of resources they contain.

The Library of Congress.  Image retrieved from Print and Photograph Online Catalog.

The system consists of twenty-one basic classes, each with an associated letter of the alphabet. Five letters were left out: I, O, W, X, Y. I’m going to make a librarianly guess that I and O were too easily confused with 1 and 0. W, X and Y were likely left out for normal end-of-the-alphabet discriminatory practices (or maybe to leave room for eventual additions). 

Each of the classes can have multiple subclasses, designated by more letters. Then there are numbers and more letters and more numbers, maybe with some punctuation sprinkled in. We’re not going to delve that deep, though, so no worries. We’ll start next week with “A” and see where it takes us. It will be super geeky, and therefore completely awesome. You can follow the posts by checking back here, watching our Twitter feed, or subscribing to the full or “LOC” category RSS feeds for Talking in the Library.