I’ve previously written about how Final Boss Library Villain Melville Dewey stuck us with his organizational system before getting booted out of the American Library Association for sexual harassment. For reals.
His namesake Dewey Decimal system does most of its job effectively enough (if you can reconcile yourself to the fact that the “job” Dewey wanted the system to do included segregating the collection in a lot of ways that seems inappropriate to a modern browser). The original post did the work of talking about many — but not all of — the modern ethical issues with Dewey both as a human and as an organizational system. But the 800s, which is the section designed to house literature of all kinds did not get the takedown it deserved.
A few weird library nerdy basics:
- We all generally understand that nonfiction refers to information that is broadly based in factual information. (“Broadly” does quite a bit of work in that sentence because opinions of all kinds are abundant in nonfiction writing, as is material that is just plain wrong.)
- The library also functionally uses the term “nonfiction” to refer to the section of materials that are shelved according to Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC).
- The library’s functional definition of nonfiction is highly inaccurate because the following materials can be found in DDC at every JCLS library: poetry, plays, folk & fairy tales, and others.
- If we were doing DDC the way Dewey intended back in 1876, everything in the library would be classified using his system, even the novels. So, in fact, it’s more accurate to say the library has a section for novels (and short stories) and a section for “everything except novels (and short stories).” Nonfiction is easier to say/understand, and so we just call the whole thing nonfiction, even though every librarian is smart enough to appreciate every single one of these bullet points.
- Sigh.
So: that leaves a couple of questions. (Or maybe you have more than that…it leaves two that I’m going to answer in this blog post; you’re on the own with the rest of your questions, but if you’ll stand still long enough, both Ellie and I at the Ashland branch —and probably other of my colleagues — will happily answer other questions you might have about DDC.)
- Why did we pull out novels (and short stories)?
- How do we navigate all the other non-nonfiction (yes, I know, but how else do I describe it at this point) left behind?
DDC puts everything that is related to literature (whether fiction or non) in the 800s. There is a lot of complexity within this “century” of Dewey and if you really want to get into the weeds of how it all breaks down, you can find more detail here. I’m going to break it down in a super general way. This means if you know a lot about DDC and are reading this, you will almost certainly think I’m not being precise enough. Consider the link to the 22-page OCLC document, supra, my acknowledgement of that imprecision).
So, the 800s: the way the “decades” (the ten-digit increments that make up the “century”) are organized is mostly by original language in which the piece was written. This seems logical-ish, but then take into account that the 10s are “American Literature in English.” And, yes, if you’re wondering, this does include literature from all the Americas that was written in English. But Margaret Atwood (and all other authors from Canada who write in English) would be at 819 and Stephen King (and all other authors from USA who write in English) would be at 813. Then there’s a whole ‘nother decade for literature written in English and Old English (presumably from anywhere that isn’t North or South America…but, honestly, everything is getting ridiculous at this point because this isn’t a very good way to classify fiction in our modern world, and that “European” in the 820s is kind of implied. This is where you will find Jane Austen…in the 823s. And so the “decades” proceed, now by language. Until you get to the 890s, where every language that didn’t originate in Western Europe goes.
AND to be fair to DDC, the other system of classification heavily used in this country is the Library of Congress Classification System, and this one also uses language/country of origin to classify literature. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s not user friendly. And that is the answer to why we don’t use it: it stinks for browsing. Like, more than anything else in the library, which can at times be fairly stinky places. What libraries have done is taken all the novels (and short stories) out of all the soup of the 8X3x/89Xs and left behind them the criticism of those works. And this allows you to do what you came here to do: just look for a good novel (or short story). By author (and maybe genre). Like normal people.
But there’s still all this great fiction up in the (ahem) nonfiction section. What of poetry and plays and everything else that was left behind? These are hard to navigate and, in Ashland specifically, where plays are more popular than average, we regularly find ourselves apologizing for the unintuitive system of organizing these things…because if you want to browse plays in Dewey, you’re using the same system…they are just all at 8X2/89X. Poetry (except epic poetry, because, or course) is at 8X1/89X. This means August Wilson and William Shakespeare are much farther apart on the shelf than you would imagine, and if you find a nice pocket of plays to browse and are noticing that we don’t have all the playwrights you think we should have, it’s because they aren’t all in the same place and you might need to ask for help. But if you ask for help, you will then need to listen to us explain how silly DDC is. And now you can see why this post is so necessary.
Every once in a while a discussion of pulling out plays and poetry like we’ve done with novels (and short stories) does come up. We do move things around from time to time, most recently when we took the graphic novels out of the 741.5s. Really what it takes for those discussions to get traction is the amount of publishing energy being devoted to the category. So, until plays become the next romantasy, this is the system we have.
We are nerdy enough to like talking about these things though, so if you have questions or ideas, come on in and talk to one of our librarians. We will listen and do our best to help…and at the very least get some good plays in your hands. Right now we are seeing a lot of OSF 2025 titles moving, so check out Jitney (812), or The Importance of Being Earnest (822), or Fat Ham (812), or Julius Caesar (822).