I'll never forget first laying my eyes on the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). I was in library school at Syracuse -- it was the late 1970s. I couldn't understand why everyday people couldn't access the text of the classification to find what they wanted in the library.
A few years later, I was a freshly minted Ph.D. and employed as a Research Scientist at the OCLC Online Computer
My work on the DDC stimulated others at OCLC, the Library of Congress, and other insitutions to make it possible for everyday people to use a library classification in their library's online catalog.
Classification figured prominently into my research on search trees, a feature of online library catalogs that places the burden of selecting the right subject searching approach on the system instead of on the catalog searcher.
My more recent work in classifcation is rather different than previous work. While on sabbatical in winter 2000, I used Macromedia Flash 4 to author a multimedia tour of the DDC entitled Dewey to the Rescue. Please take the tour to learn about the DDC and its ability to organize knowledge.
C o n t e nts Q u i c k Bio S u b j e c t Headings C l a s s i fication S e a r c h Strategies D i g i t a l Libraries V i s u a l Images
