Wow, that is really old. I loved that talk.

It's still funny with cats. Bald guys... not so much.

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My library has DDC bookmarks with this image on it.

I actually have a bone to pick with Mr. Dewey.

When my field of study was founded in the early 1900's as a way to improve the lives of families through application of scientific learning to household functioning, Ellen Swallow Richards proposed that the name of the discipline be "Ecology", from the Greek meaning "The study of the home". At that time, no discipline had that title, as ecology as environmental studies had not yet been developed. (Actually, Ellen Swallow Richards was instrumental in founding that field of study as well.) Mr. Dewey, cataloger of all things, decided instead to call it "Home Economics", which from the Greek is actually redundant, as "oikonomos" means "home management".

The re-emphasis of "home" in Dewey's title reinforced the notion that this field was merely a place to warehouse women who dared to go to college in those days, making them (as my department head stated yesterday in a talk to our honor society), "really good housewives". To this day, people characterize my chosen field as "cooking, cleaning, and coupon-clipping", even though it was founded by a group of women and men to improve the lives of a nation through science. Remember, this was an era where mothers sewed their children into their clothes all winter to keep them from getting colds and the early mass producers of canned goods used formaldehyde to keep the color of green vegetables. Scientists were learning about germ theory and Dr. Harvey Wiley's "Poison Squad" had just shown the public how hazardous the food additives being used really were, yet most families weren't educated about how to use these discoveries in their own homes.

/Rant over

You mean he wasn't THIS Dewey?
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LOL!

To be fair, lleachie, I think that might have happened even if another name had been chosen. James K. Galbraith has written how the advent of modern appliances brought so many "menial" jobs into the home that the stature of the wife became socially diminished during the 20th century. It's an interesting theory.

stillcho, that's an interesting theory. There's plenty of evidence that the introduction of modern appliances, so-called "labor-saving" appliances, actually increased time spent in housework. This is because standards for housework increased during that time. At least partially at-fault for the menialization of housework, as well, is the field of home economics itself -- it was complicit in the post-WWII women's magazines propaganda to get women back into the home to make space in the workforce for the returning veterans. (That in and of itself is a fascinating study -- the subtle propaganda that got women into the workforce in WWII, and the not-quite-as-subtle propaganda that got women OUT of it.)

This is perhaps the worst thing home economics did for itself -- the era of "make your husband the king of his castle" home economics gave us a black eye we've never quite overcome.

However, Galbraith's theory doesn't explain the struggle that Home Economics faced in its birth to even exist in colleges, which Dewey was a part of. And improving home conditions through science doesn't necessarily depend on "the stature of the wife", because, frankly, we're still doing this in a culture where (in two-parent families), partners are increasingly becoming equally responsible for the housework and labor market work.

Oh, there are definitely some bones to pick with Mr. Dui. Jess' talk has more details, but dude was also kind of a pig, and kind of an... let's say ethnocentrist. Because of the work of the people who have maintained the DDC in the intervening years, it's come a long way in these departments. But there are plenty of embarrassments remaining, and there's definitely a ways to go.

It's not a bad cataloging system, though, all in all. Of course, that said, I'd like to see a number in the 700s somewhere for tattoos-as-art, in addition to the one in the 390s, with fashion and whatnot. Video games appear in two different ranges--to simplify, there's one for books about games and one for books about hardware. And something like, say, the War on Drugs might appear in at least three or four different places (to simplify, based on whether the book takes a psychological or sociological or legal or political perspective).

But that's the thing about the Dewey subject headings, and it's something that one could probably say about Ask Metafilter or Wikipedia too. When it's a subject I don't know anything about, I say 'Wow, how smart and well-organized. This is a great resource.' But when it's something with which I'm more familiar, I've got a million nitpicky criticisms big and small, and the information doesn't always seem that good. Is everybody else that way too? With Wikipedia and AskMe, I mean?

Enough about Dewey--I've got to go do library work. I'm putting on a Guitar Hero program for the kiddies today.

It's not a bad cataloging system, though, all in all.

Agreed. I always found Dewey extremely comprehensible - 10 major categories, so you could always take a fairly solid guess as to the best couple of bets where your topic might show up. And the idea of the relative, i-dunno, -viscerality of the questions After working as a library page in high school, I found I developed almost a sort of physical, instinctual sense of what went where. I still have that physical space mapped onto the Dewey categories in my mind.

I've gotten used to LC of course, but there was a beauty in the simplicity of Dewey's system. You can teach Dewey to third- and fourth-graders and watch not only the library open up to them (a key! a key!) but also, through creation of and practice with that model, it makes an excellent introduction to information hierarchy, a much clearer one than LC, that then opens the door to them understanding the more sophisticated LC much more easily when they inevitably hit it.