Reslicing publications
The OCLC has an experimental site up that provides classification information for books and pubs. You type in the book’s title and author (or ISBN number, or other such ID), and it returns info about the various editions and how they’re classified in the OCLC’s Dewey Decimal Classification System or by the Library of Congress. You can then see the other books that share its Dewey Decimal number (for example, here’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, #303.4833>>Social sciences>>Social sciences, sociology & anthropology>>Social processes), at the OCLC’s useful Dewey Browser. Alas, when you click on the Library of Congress number, you get taken to a demand by the LC that you subscribe to Classification Web, instead of to the free LC Catalog (where my Misc book is listed like this).
Lots of metadata about the metadata…Gotta love it!
That’s really cool service. I tried it on a book I got at hand (Exodus = Shemot, M. Carasik) and the result was good and sensible.
How do you feel about DDC today, wrapped in the modern webservices, classification webs etc.
I remember the respective passages from “Everything …” and from some of your lectures ?
Do you support what OCLC writes on its web:
“It is (DDC) built on sound principles that make it ideal as a general knowledge organization tool: meaningful notation, well-defined categories and well-developed hierarchies.”
I have some doubts….
I’d say that if they are indeed good categories and hierarchies, they are just another source to link to; why should a book have just one place in the scheme though?
BTW, DDC is used by librarians.
Seems to me there is another attempt to rise their importance. See Hakia
and how they plan to involve librarians (in some metaphorical sense) in the valuation of sites credibility.
This is also another full-scale search engine with Semantic Web engines under the hood.
Wonder, when they will use DDC :-)
sorry for bad link. Good one: Hakia