[lbo-talk] Socialim [was: Cheery thought for the next 300 years

Chuck chuck at mutualaid.org
Wed Feb 22 10:16:44 PST 2006


Doug Henwood wrote:
> Chuck wrote:
>
>> Aren't anarchists against organization?
>
>
> Is that a trick question? Because the answer is no, right?

Just being sarcastic. Anarchists are in favor of organization. The Circle-A graphic--which I hear is one of the more successful examples of branding around--includes the "O" part which stands for order.

http://www.infoshop.org/faq/append2.html#circledA

Jim asks a funny question about classification schemes. Anarchists, of course, aren't opposed to classification schemes. Anarchy is about order, not chaos (we'll skip the side discussion about chaos and self-organizing systems).

Classification schemes such as the Dewey and LC systems are plagued by some serious problems. The Dewey Decimal System is the worst offender, because it was developed long ago and is used by many public library systems. The DCC has lots of problems with bias, mostly against anything that falls outside of Western Civilization such as non-Christian religions and politics. The DDC has other problems. The LC is much better, but it is a system designed for Congress. It has also been a system resistant to change--witness my colleague Sandy Berman's long battle to reform LC subject classifications.

My personal collection of books really has no organizational scheme. I have so many books and they are being used for different projects, so they tend to move around alot. My computer books are roughly together at this point. The other "classification" in my home system is that new, unread books are kept together.

An interesting thing is happening to the library world and that involves new classification schemes based on user-tagging. This system is used by sites such as Flickr. The democracy of this system worries some librarians and excites others. I like the new technology, because I think that librarians should be facilitators, not gatekeepers. And if you'v eever tried to find stuff in the Yellow Pages, you'll understand the limitations of fixed classification schemes.

Boring library jargon talk over and out,

Chuck



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