Not sure how I missed this one, but a week or so back Tim Spalding of LibraryThing fame put up a call for librarians to lead a project to create an open classification system. Tim’s vision is for a free, modern, humble, collaborativley written and assigned scheme as an alternative to Dewey (and others, but Dewey gets a special mention)
LibraryThing is offering to write the code necessary for the project, but wants a small group of librarians to lead the project. An LT group has been set up and already has 195 members.
Check out Tim’s blog post (Build the Open Shelves Classification) which has stirred up 45 comments.
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July 18, 2008 at 17:32
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked in depth at classification schemes, but aren’t there already several alternatives to DDC? What about UDC?
Or perhaps there is a way to do as software developers do and fork something that exists and modifying it instead of starting from stratch?
Credit to LibraryThing though for being interested in these issues, I’d like to see them hook up with the Open Library project, and semantic web developers.
December 1, 2008 at 07:17
An Open Source classification system is a true need.
The strength of DDC and Library of Congress are their ready availability, to those who can or would pay dearly for them. UDC is also available, for a hefty fee.
For Joe Sixfootshelf, there is no easy way to legally and inexpensively classify his books aside from developing his own classification system… reinventing wheels for most of us.
Certainly, a simple enumerative classification system built around the basic architecture of DDC (disregarding jingoistic stuff like the 810-819 area) and offering faceting could be quite valuable to amateurs and unspecialised libraries. Conceivably, such a system could be expanded to fit the needs of specialised and larger libraries.