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.