How I spent my Friday night
July 6, 2007 8:52 pm Daily lifeAn essay
When I got home from work I called Martha (see photos above) and asked if she wanted to come over and help me classify my books by the Dewey decimal system. This is a true story.
She kindly obliged and humored me as I scanned books and checked to see if the library of congress had them on file, wishing to defer to the national authority. A few times we begged to differ with the LOC classification; for example, 220: Bible is for bibles- any translation, but NOT for bible studies, at least not in my library. In that case we went with the topic of the particular study as our number.
Once we had to call Tim Porter to ask the definition of eschatology, since I wasn’t sure if The End Times Made Simple by Samuel E. Waldron belonged in that section or the one titled Apocalypse. Porter clarified for us that the eschatology is “the Study of Last Things”, whereas apocalyptic literature tended to focus more specifically on the book of revelation. Since this book encompasses so much more we went with 236: Eschatology.
Other controversies included where to classify books on “Christian” Cults, since there is no number specifically assigned to this. We went with 202: Doctrines reasoning that the major differences were doctrinal.
Oh! And we came up with a brilliant method for Biographies. Martha suggested I use 2 lines on the printed label. The top line says BIO and the bottom line categorizes by topic, keeping all my biographies in one section.
A good time was had by all. It takes a good friend to humor me in this. Thanks Farfy.
July 7th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
I love you my little geeky-geekerton! I’ll bet Porter loved it that you called him to ask the meaning of eschatology.
July 9th, 2007 at 4:09 am
Now I know who to ask when I start on the library…
:)Kelli
July 9th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Sounds like fun to me…did you consider comparing your classifications to local libraries? You can look online at any book that the Wisconsin Library System has to see how they would categorize those troublesome books. Just an idea. : )
July 9th, 2007 at 9:39 am
oh! Erin- that is brilliant! No I did not think of that.
Well, we have plenty more to do and we’ll add that to our method.