Date: 2006-02-04 01:07 am (UTC)
Pretty much all the areas that have geographic subdivisions use about those same proportions. Maybe two-tenths of the 200s, the religion section, has non-Christian stuff; only one-tenth of the 400s, Languages, has languages not originating in Europe; the same in the 800s, Literature; Geography/History is about the only major area that is remotely evenly divided up. All the subdivisions for encyclopedias and serials. "Oriental" philosophy is stuck in 180 with ancient and medieval philosophy, while "Modern Western philosophy" has from 190 to just before 200. (Source: http://www.tnrdlib.bc.ca/dewey.html.)

But Melville Dewey probably was reflecting what was in the collections of American non-academic libraries in 1876. And the changes that have been made since (adding computers and such) are the ones that reflected the collections of public libraries since then. I don't know that public libraries often have such a multiplicity of foreign papers that this is difficult for them, and the same for foreign-language books, etc. I'd think generally there's a single non-English-speaking community for each library/ system that gets the "other" category to itself in a public library; research libraries aren't likely to use Dewey.

(And it doesn't surprise me that Monaco and Luxembourg are in different categories, given that Monaco is historically associated with Italy and France, while Luxembourg is more historically associated with the Netherlands and Belgium and even Germany.)
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

November 2010

S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324 252627
282930    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 27th, 2025 11:32 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios