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29 results in Essential Classification

Page 2 of 2

  • 20 - Universal Decimal Classification 2: auxiliary tables

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 265-298

  • Summary

    Auxiliary tables in the UDC

    One of the principal features of Otlet's original scheme was the introduction of auxiliary tables. These auxiliary tables provide an economical way of scheduling the sort of terms that occur over and over again in the subjects of documents. When we looked at LCC we saw that concepts such as periodicals or geographical treatment were repeated very many times in the schedules, and that this repetition leads to very lengthy schedules. In UDC such terms are listed only once, in a series of special tables which can be used to qualify classes in the main tables. Although other schemes do make use of auxiliaries, UDC is unusual in the number of tables that it provides.

    The auxiliaries in UDC greatly increase the specificity that you can achieve in subject description, and they are one way in which very detailed and expressive classmarks can be built.

    The tables which can be applied to any classmark throughout the scheme are known as systematic auxiliary tables. Other auxiliaries exist which are used only in particular subjects, and they are called special auxiliary tables.

    Systematic auxiliaries

    The systematic auxiliaries provide for:

  • • concepts that relate to the form of documents

  • • very commonly encountered subject concepts.

    • There are three tables concerned with form, and they cover:

  • • the language of the document

  • • the physical form, or medium, of the document

  • • the form of presentation.

    • You will notice that these are concepts that don't tell us anything about the content of a document, but they are nevertheless useful to express since readers may look for them.

    The rest of the systematic auxiliaries deal with subject-related concepts. You'll remember some of these concepts from the chapters on content analysis. The common subject concepts include:

  • • places

  • • periods

  • • ethnicity and nationality

  • • persons

  • • materials

  • • properties

  • • relations, processes and operations.

    • Each of these auxiliaries is introduced by its own particular symbol, and we'll look at each in turn. Generally, you can add a systematic auxiliary directly to the main table number which it qualifies. Because each auxiliary has a distinctive symbol to introduce it you don't need to alter either the main table number or the auxiliary when you're adding them together.

  • 23 - Classification in digital space

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 339-374

  • Summary

    Reading the parts of this book dealing with the major classification schemes and lists of subject headings you may have assumed a context of physical collections and print publications. In fact the role played by classificatory structures and classification theory in organizing and discovering online resources is considerable; it can range from the application of traditional classification and subject cataloguing tools to electronic publications, and the use of controlled vocabularies and taxonomies in managed information services in the commercial sector, to the development of more advanced types of automatic classification in the world of the web.

    One of the most important functions of a classification is as a representation of a subject field or domain through the concepts, terms and relationships it contains. Viewed in this way, a classification can act as a model and a map of the domain, and in those roles it helps with organization of material, location and indexing, browsing and searching. The idea of a classification as a model is important (Figure 23.1). It is like other scientific models in that it provides a simplified, but more understandable, view of a real-world situation; just as the ‘molecular model’ of the solar system helps us grasp the idea of the relative position of the sun and the planets, and planetary motion, even though the real thing is not so exact, so the classification model of a subject or domain allows us to work with the information there. It enables us to generalize about the nature of knowledge, and to organize and retrieve it in ways that can be understood by end-users, although information is much more chaotic and disorganized than we might like to believe. In particular it gives us a framework for expressing and managing complexity in subject content in a predictable and logical manner. Although the model in Figure 23.1 is a two-dimensional one, a classification model can be in as many dimensions as you wish, and the relationships as numerous as are needed.

    The structure and logic of the classification can also provide a basis for machines rather than humans to carry out all of those activities. For example, uncontrolled words and phrases extracted automatically from text can be mapped to the controlled vocabulary of the classification in order to assign subject metadata, or to better formulate searches.

  • 4 - The variety of classification: systems and structures

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 13-22

  • Summary

    So far we've looked at fairly informal examples of sorting and arrangement – what might be done on a pragmatic basis and at a local level. One wouldn't expect the supermarket classification, or a rough arrangement of literature books, to be written down or distributed for others to use. The world is full of examples of this sort of local or personal classification; office filing systems are a typical example, as is any arrangement of the content of your kitchen cupboards or your wardrobe.

    At a more public level there are a vast number of formal, published classifications of an immense variety of entities and phenomena. A search for ‘classification of ‘ using Google will return you in excess of 360 million sites. Among these are classifications for proteins, reptiles, disabilities, wetlands, daffodils, scorpions, depression, learning skills, theories of divine action, caviar, parachutes, subtle changes in facial expression, portable fire extinguishers, Bible commands, angles, thunderstorms, millionaires, chickens and tea.

    Scientific classifications and taxonomies

    For the most part these are classifications of different sorts of physical and biological entities, and they're constructed using the fundamental principles of grouping and ordering, which we discussed in Chapter 3, in a more extended, rigorous and systematic manner. The methodology they employ goes back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who, in the Organon, laid down the rules for creating categories of objects in the natural world. Aristotle produced the first classification for natural history, and the methods he used endure to the present day. He grouped natural phenomena (plants, birds, animals, people) into sets based on attributes or properties relating to their external appearance and behaviour, and he ordered these groups on the basis of their comparative similarity (or dissimilarity).

    A classification of this kind is referred to as a taxonomy (from the Greek taxis meaning arrangement or order, and nomos, meaning law or rule). Although information managers often use the term taxonomy today to mean any vaguely structured set of terms in a subject area, taxonomy is a major scientific discipline with a highly developed, exact and complex methodology, usually supported by computational techniques.

  • 7 - Order in the classification scheme

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 41-56

  • Summary

    Now that we have examined the ways in which the internal structure of a scheme might be organized, we'll consider the broader question of order throughout the scheme.

    Main classes

    In Chapter 4, we looked at the difference between scientific and bibliographic classifications, and at the fact that the bibliographic scheme is usually an aspect classification. That is to say, the organization of topics is based on areas of study or activity, and the first division of the scheme is into disciplines or subject domains.

    This first division of a classification creates what are called main classes. A rough definition of a main class is that it corresponds to a single notational character: for example, in UDC, class 2 is the main class Religion, and in LCC, class N is the main class Fine Arts. You can see from Figure 7.1 that the number of main classes depends on the notation used. Not everybody would agree with this interpretation, and another understanding of main classes is that they equate to the traditional disciplines. In these terms, chemistry would always be a main class, whether it has notational main class status (as in the Bibliographic Classification's class C) or not (as in DDC's class 54).

    Whatever the notational status of a main class, it is clear that the classification must treat it as a coherent subject. The different aspects of geography as studied in the UK aren't brought together in DDC, so students of this subject using a DDC classified library will find their books in several different places. It could therefore be said that DDC has no main class ‘geography’.

    What constitutes a main class varies from one scheme to another, and the provision of main classes for unusual subjects can encourage the adoption of that classification in special libraries. For example, the Bibliographic Classification is the only one to have a main class for social welfare, and this has led to its adoption by many social service libraries and libraries of charitable organizations. LCC is the only scheme that has main classes for military and naval science.

    Cross-disciplinary studies and phenomena classes

    Users of the big general classification schemes will have trouble in classifying books about cross-disciplinary studies.

  • 9 - Content analysis 2: practical constraints

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 75-88

  • Summary

    In the last chapter we looked at how to make a document analysis on an objective basis, identifying all the likely sought terms and arranging them in an ‘ideal’ order.

    In the real world two things will cause you to make some modifications to your ideal statement of content:

  • • the operating rules of the classification you're using

  • • the needs of the users as reflected in the library's own practices.

    • The first of these will be covered in the chapters on how to apply particular classifications. In this chapter we shall look at how to modify your objective statements to meet local requirements.

    Broad and close classification

    The problem of how exactly books need to be arranged is an old and thorny one. Librarians have usually decided to make precise classmarks for their books, whereas booksellers make broader groupings. The philosophy underpinning this is doubtless that the bookseller wishes the customer to browse, and to look at as many books as possible. Librarians, on the other hand, want readers to find the book most closely related to their information needs.

    When the retrieval function is more important than browsing, documents must be given classmarks that reflect as nearly as possible their subjects. We call this close classification.

    In the UK in the 1980s, a fashion arose for much less precise classification, the remains of which practice can be seen in many public libraries today. Instead of applying a conventional classification such as DDC, books were allocated to a category such as travel, sport or hobbies. Such a system was known as categorization or reader interest classification. The case for such schemes was founded on users’ alleged lack of understanding of traditional classification (which is probably true), but savings in time and money undoubtedly played a part. A balance was being struck between the effort expended in cataloguing books and the perceived lack of need for this at the consumer end.

    This is an extreme example of the conflict between broad and close classification, between browsing and retrieval, but many libraries nowadays will give some consideration to how much time they spend on creating records and whether the work involved is really necessary.

  • 3 - First principles of classification

  • Vanda Broughton
  • Book:
    Essential Classification
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    31 July 2015, pp 7-12

  • Summary

    Two ideas are fundamental to any system of classification: grouping and ordering. Grouping is the primary act of classification and one that is inherent in human thinking, as we saw in the introduction. We can all classify in this sense quite instinctively.

    Grouping

    Exercise 3.1

    Consider the following sets of concepts, and identify the odd one out in each.

    1 banana sausage aubergine cauliflower

    2 spade rake trowel frying pan

    3 karate kung-fu knitting kick-boxing

    4 Paris Rome Idaho Cairo

    I hope your answers will be:

    1 sausage (because the others are fruits and vegetables)

    2 frying pan (because the others are garden implements)

    3 knitting (because it is not a martial art)

    4 Idaho (because it is not a capital city)

    This may seem to be a trivial exercise, but it serves to illustrate the essence of classification – the act of putting like with like and separating unlike – and it shows that at the broad level it is quite easy to do. Hopefully you were able not only to group the concepts, but also to identify the principles by which you did this, so that there was a logical and philosophical basis to your classification. The principle used to create a group is sometimes called the principle of division or characteristic of division: this is the technical term for the property or attribute that all the members of a group have in common.

    Ordering

    This process of grouping together related terms or concepts is central to a classification scheme, and it forms the first stage in constructing a classification. The second stage is to decide on the relationships between groups, since this determines the order in which the groups will be arranged.

    Let's start by making some groups within the general area of vegetables. By putting like with like, we could organize the carrots, parsnips and turnips to make a class of root vegetables. Now we need to consider what will be placed next. We might want to position other groups of vegetables (leafy vegetables, and pulses) near to the roots, and then locate the whole class of vegetables near to other crops, such as fruits and cereals.

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