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Lib. Sci. Reference Olivet 11-1-26 13970

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N the March number of the JOURNAL, 1878, there was described a plan for numbering and arranging books on the shelves in such a manner that, given a knowledge of the class or sub-class, any individual volume therein could be obtained without recourse to the number. In the present paper an attempt will be made to show how the classes themselves can be so arranged and designated as to be self-explanatory.

Without discussing the value of Logical, or their mongrel offshoots, "Practical," schemes of classification for catalogue purposes, experience has shown that they afford very little help in finding the place of a given subject on the shelves, and that they necessitate a constant reference to the catalogues.

Various partial attempts have been made to modify this evil, and more especially by Mr. Dewey, in his Decimal system, in which he has largely availed himself of the principal of mnemonic suggestion in laying out the details of his classification. "For instance," to borrow his own explanation, "the scheme is so arranged that China has always the number 1. After the same manner the Indian number is 2; Egyptian, 4; English, 2; German, 3; French, 4; Italian, 5; Spanish, 6, etc., etc. Users of the scheme will notice this mnemonic principle in several hundred places in the classification, and will find it of great practical utility in VOL. IV., No. 1.

numbering and finding books without the aid of Catalogue or Index." As appears from an inspection of his scheme, he principally confines his applications of mnemonics to divisions by languages or countries, and even there they do not appear to be based on any general principle, and therefore cannot properly he said to suggest themselves. Mr. Winsor also, as might have been expected, has not been slow in availing himself of this valuable principle, and intimates that it will be extensively applied in a system planned for the re-arrangement of the Harvard College Library. So far as I can judge from his brief allusion to the subject at the London Conference, his applications will, in the main, be similar in principle to those of Mr. Dewey. Another form of artificial aid is afforded by the British Museum classification, in which valuable results, it is said, are obtained by an arrangement and distribution of the classes, in a certain fixed order of countries and languages.

While acknowledging the value of these attempts I wish to call attention to what may be called, to borrow a Hibernicism, a natural system of mnemonics, viz., the order of the alphabet. I call this a "natural" system because it is intelligible to every one, and we all have to learn it, and there is, therefore, no effort required in its application. My attention was called to the value of this principle by a recent

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attempt to use it in the arrangement of a small library. Mr. Botsford, of the Harlem Library, N. Y. City, who has adopted the "Combined Systems," recently described in the JOURNAL, instead of arranging the general classes (which, it will be remembered, were to be designated by the successive letters of the alphabet) in any supposed logical order, has so distributed the letters that in many cases they suggest the classes they represent. By this means he gets the following classes: A, Arts; B, Biography; D, Drama and Poetry; F, Fiction; H, History; L, Literature; M, Medicine; N, Natural history; P, Philosophy; R, Religion; S, Science; T, Travels. His scheme, however, is defective, inasmuch as it lacks both completeness and co-ordination. It lacks completeness inasmuch as five of his classes are not suggestive at all: the letters K, O, U, V, W, representing respectively Language, French literature, Political science, Reference books, and Periodicals. There is, therefore, a mixture of two schemes which introduces an element of uncertainty. Furthermore, his sub-classes are arranged in the usual arbitrary manner. His scheme lacks co-ordination, inasmuch as class E, Education, O, French literature, and G, German literature, hardly deserve the dignity of a general class. On the other hand, the extensive field of History and Travels is crowded into two classes, H and T, and the equally extensive science Law forms merely a sub-class of Political science.

In the following scheme an attempt has been made to avoid these defects and carry out the mnemonic idea in detail. It is constructed on the following principles:

1. The scheme is arranged in twentyone principal classes with nine sub-classes in each, all in strict alphabetical order both in the classes and their subdivisions.

2. The letter assigned to each class will at once suggest itself, with the single

exception of class K, Language, which is, however, in its proper alphabetical order, and immediately precedes class L, Literature, with which it is intimately connected and popularly associated.

3. If we divide the field of knowledge into the three grand divisions, HISTORY, LITERATURE, and SCIENCE, it will be found. that each of these departments has exactly seven classes. TO HISTORY We may assign classes B, C, E, H, O, U, and V; to LITERATURE, classes D, F, K, L, P, R, and W; and to SCIENCE, classes A, G, J, M, N, S, and T. This adjustment of the classification secures both co-ordination and subordination and provides for the uneven growth of the different classes an important point not sufficiently taken into account in laying out plans of classification.

4. The sub-classes, besides being in strict alphabetical order, are so arranged that all those beginning with the letters A and B have the sub-class No. 1; those beginning with C and D, No. 2; with E and F, No. 3; with G and H, No. 4; with I, J and K, No. 5; with L, M and N, No. 6; with O, P and Q, No. 7; with R, S and T, No. 8; and with U to Z, No. 9. This scheme is easily learned, an additional aid to the memory being afforded by the fact that the vowels are all represented by the odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. An examination of the classification will show that this principle has been applied as far as it was possible to do so, and in a few instances where the exigencies of the case would not permit this, it will be found that there is a variation of only one number. Mining, for instance, is correctly numbered S, 6, but Mathematics in the same class has the symbol S, 5,—a variation of one, in this case caused by the fact that two of the sub-classes in SCIENCE happen to begin with M. This unavoidable evil, if it can be so called, is no deduction from the comparative advan