h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ok - that was a BIG title! Basically, I'm looking for a place where I can come in and ask questions, give answers, share experiences and work out solutions together.....about the Dewey Decimal system! In our UK junior schools!

Reason I ask is I volunteered to help move my 6yr old son's school library before summer hols. When I first went in, they had kids packing the old library up....just throwing books into boxes. Everything got confused.

Now I'm charged with sorting out the new library and I DO actually understand the Dewey System categories. I've unpacked every box myself! And I've sorted out fiction from non-fiction and reference. And I've subsorted fiction into picture books and early readers and competent readers and then into proper fiction, author surname alphabetically. I've also only just spent 2 days looking at the Junior Librarian(3) system. To me, that's easy cos of my computer literacy!

I won't say much else until I'm sure I'm in the right place....for now, just to say I need as much help and advice as I can get to set this library up. I'm just a voluntary parent helper and there's practically no dedicated librarian...it's just me, trying to sort it all out. (The dedicated librarian is a part time teacher - she only works 2 days a week (Mon/Tue) and is so busy with her teaching responsibilities, she can't spare any time in the library!

I'm putting in a fair few hours....cos I want to get it right. I'm computer literate and an ex Training Manager for a large financial company so I have skills that are either over and/or underused in this project.

I just need to make contact with UK based school librarian types who can guide me and don't mind answering lots of questions!

Anyone up for it?

Cheers....Celine

Hello and welcome to h2g2 celingod.

I've left you a welcome message on your Personal Space, it will hopefully help you finding your way around the site. As for your question: <./>Askh2g2</.> is probably a better place to post it. Lots of Researchers are subscribed to that so you should get a few replies.

Bel

I worked in a library, and learned off a fair bit of the Dewey Decimal system. Mine was an Irish secondary school, but it can't be too different, can it?

What do you want to know?

TRiG.

I work in a higher education library using Dewey Decimal (all hail Dewey!), so if I can help, I will. No idea how things may differ in school libraries (other than making things less complex, I'd assume), but I'm willing and available.

Hi everyone,

Thank you all so much for your replies and offers of help.

I think I'll do as Bel suggested and pop my question over to h2g2, so am hoping you can all find me over there again with future questions!

Meanwhile my first one is.....I want to input the Dewey Categories into the school library's database. The system is called Junior Librarian 3. Firstly, I need to obtain the most up to date list of Dewey categories and classifications, ie not just the overall category numbers, but the sub categories and sub, sub categories!
Most of the sites I've looked at only provide an overview, but I haven't gotten through all of them yet. Maybe someone out there already knows where I can find this?

Thanks again....Celine

http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/Reference/Libraries/Professional_Resources/Library_Classification/Dewey_Decimal_Classification/


This link will take you to areas where you can see the classifications


lil x

Hi Celine,

The level of detail you want is not freely available, I'm afraid. You can access the 10 classes, the 100 divisions and the 1000 summaries freely (i.e. as much detail as 155 or 621), but further specific detail (155.4 or anything further), indexes and so forth are (as far as I know) only available by purchasing the DDC books or subscribing to WebDewey. Neither is cheap!

David

The program I used in the school libraries I worked in was called Alice for Windows. This was specifically designed for school libraries (i.e., different year groups may have different borrowing rights, and there's a quick and easy way to move all first year students to second year students; alternatively, instead of holding its own student database, it can connect to the main roll database).

AfW also had a plugin (which cost a small fortune) which had full bibliographic details of most books with ISBNs, so you could type in the ISBN and the Title, Author, Publisher, and Dewey Decimal number would be filled in automatically.

The second school I worked in couldn't afford this, but they did make a note of the ISBNs of all books in the library before they installed Alice (quick and easy work with a barcode scanner), and sent that list off to the software company. So Alice was installed with "phantom" books (barcodes beginning with Z, instead of the usual R) for each ISBN. So when a new book with the same ISBN was added, the details for that ISBN were already in there. And then you could delete the "phantom" book in that category.

So you only needed to worry about manually adding details for books without ISBNs and for new books, bought after the software. And for most of these, the Dewey Decimal classification is printed on the flyleaf.

TRiG.