Turning NLM into Dewey; re-classification of a nursing collection

摘要

The CILIP special interest group, CIG, recently held a very interesting re-classification event that gave practitioners a chance to tell their stories and offer advice and help to others who may have been considering re-classification. CIG also held an e-forum on the topic; this gave people who were unable to attend the re-classification event an opportunity to contribute to the debate, to share and to learn. I’ve previously blogged about how I plan and prepare for a new edition of our classification scheme, so I thought I’d share with you here an account of how we went about re-classifying to DDC, a smallish collection that was classified according to NLM, prior to it being integrated with a larger collection. I ought to say at this point that I am actually very much in favour of a dedicated classification scheme, especially if it’s used for a separate collection housed at a different site from the main library, like our nursing collection was. I was very sorry to lose the specificity of NLM for this collection, although I realised that if it were to merge with the collection in the main library then it would be better all round if the two collections used the same classification scheme. In some ways we are very lucky to have all our books classified using Dewey and that we have a Dewey sequence that runs from 001-999 spread over only two floors, and with a split (albeit an illogical one!) in the middle of the 610s! It’s really only since I’ve been going on university open days with my daughter that I’ve come to realise that many academic libraries use a mix of classification schemes and don’t have straight runs and while I can quite see the point of having similar subjects shelved together, I can equally appreciate that it’s much easier and quicker for shelvers to shelve, and users to find, books when they are in a sequential layout.