Farewell to Dewey

While browsing through LIS News I've noticed a number of recent posts discussing the decisions of some smaller suburban library branches doing away with the Dewey Decimal Classification system for an organizational scheme aligned to corporate book sellers like Barnes and Noble and Borders. This organizational scheme used by B&N and others is called BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications), and if you've ever stepped inside the confines of a commercial bookstore you've noticed that items are broadly organized by general subject categories like "History" or "True Crime." Of course, the adoption of a cataloging scheme that physically aligns itself so closely to book stores has produced an ample amount of discourse about abandoning the DDC.

The beauty of the DDC is that the decimal # assigned to a work can tell you where it can be found on a physical shelf and the subject of the work (if you know what the numbers mean). Personally, I have found that locating items in libraries that are classified under DDC or Library of Congress classification is easier than finding an item within a bookstore. Then again, I have worked in a physical library for a number of years and have become quite comfortable with this system. However, for the casual library patron, a system that tags a book by its general subject category may be easier to navigate and provide a more user-friendly system for locating items of interest. It has also been mentioned that BISAC organization may be a better system for subject browsing in a system's OPAC than Dewey as well.

I don't believe the DDC system should be eradicated by any means, but individual libraries should have the freedom to tailor a practice to meet the demands of their patrons. If circulation is higher with the BISAC system in place than with Dewey, as it was with a suburban Phoenix branch library, then why wouldn't the library choose to permanently break from "tradition"?