Declassifying the Library of Congress Classification: The Case of the Department of Philosophy Library at the University of Padova (Padua, Italy)

摘要

The ongoing project to revise the arrangement of the open shelves library collections occasioned a historiographic account of the implementation phases of the Library of Congress Classification (LCC), subclasses B-BJ - Philosophy and Psychology, at the Library of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Padua (Italy). The schema was adopted as a collection shelving and location device since the Library institution in 1997. The LCC international acknowledgement and the neutralrnframework of the schema have undoubtedly played a role of driving factors at the first stage of the selection process. However, the implementation of the classification scheme had to consider critical issues like the shortage of the library area, the selection criteria of the appropriate bibliographic material, as well as the effort to settle and tailor the original schema to the specific needs of the library collections and its end-users. The purpose of this paper is twofold: from one hand, we aim to examine in detail each stage of the implementation project in order to provide a preliminary impact evaluation of the classification schema both on the collections management and development and on the research practices of the local users community; from the other, we intend to highlight the principal factors that have implied a sort of declassification process of the system itself. In conclusion, we argue that the declassification of library collections can be read, from a bottom-up perspective, as index of vitality of the collections themselves, as well as a valuable basis for planning the next steps of the Library project.