Claire Woodcock on the Search for a More Democratic Way of Organizing Knowledge
Here’s the introduction to this great piece.
It didn’t take long for Todd Lockwood to realize that a hierarchical book classification system would not work for the Brautigan Library. He was, after all, following through on Richard Brautigan’s vision to archive and curate unpublished manuscripts by unknown but inspiring writers. It was 1990, and people were traveling to Burlington, Vermont, from all over the world to experience what this strange and tender library had to offer.
But the source material, Brautigan’s first novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, didn’t cover book classification systems. By this point, Lockwood had far surpassed Brautigan’s original vision of a library that only sought to collect and preserve “the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing” by opening the library up to the public at any capacity.
So Lockwood and early supporters of the Brautigan Library put their heads together and whipped up the Mayonnaise System: a thirteen-category classification system as easy to shelve as category and date in the order each manuscript was received. Some categories like “Adventure” and “Poetry” were seemingly more straightforward than “Street Life” or “Social/Political/Cultural.” Writers would choose which category they felt captured the essence of their works. The Mayonnaise System is more loyal to what the works mean than what they say. It’s a classification system where nothing must be as it seems.
This is in contrast to the Library of Congress Classification, the most widely used library classification system among academic libraries in the U.S. The decade the Brautigan Library implemented the Mayonnaise System was the decade Library of Congress Classification was rounding the corner toward its centennial. Melissa Adler, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Library and Information Science, calls 1876 one of the most important years in library classification history.
As Adler points out, this was the year the American Library Association (ALA) and Library Journal was founded, the year Melvil Dewey published the Dewey Decimal Classification and Charles Ammi Cutter issued the foundational Rules for a Dictionary Catalog as part of the U.S. Bureau of Education’s “Special Report on Public Libraries.” Rules for a Dictionary Catalog introduced librarians and information scientists to the concept of evolutionary order. Rules for a Dictionary Catalog would come to evolve into Expansive Classification. In Expansive Classification, Cutter establishes twenty-one classes to organize all knowledge, followed by subclasses and sub-subclasses. The Library of Congress adopted these top classification elements in 1898, making Cutter’s classificatory principles among the most highly influential and lasting in the field.
The Mayonnaise System is more loyal to what the works mean than what they say.
Cutter’s life’s work revolved around the belief that a classification system informed by evolutionary order would evolve naturally and standardize collection growth across all libraries. And while no one can deny the need for a high-functioning information schema, the theory of evolutionary order is rooted in scientific racism. Thomas Dousa, a metadata analyst librarian at the University of Chicago Library theorizes in his research that Cutter may have been influenced by the men in his social circles, such as John Fiske—a librarian also passionate about introducing evolutionary-based classification into library catalogs—and Richard Bliss—an anthropologist who defended Cutter’s “natural” system for how it categorized social science topics were “not usually considered susceptible to a natural and systematic arrangement” in Library Journal.
It seems Cutter was in good company with the early librarian leadership establishment, receiving support for introducing scientific racism, or the now-debunked belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial inferiority and racial superiority into his book classification system. We see the outgrowth of scientific racism, as well as scientific sexism and scientific heterosexism in Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are rooted in what Amanda Ros, a cataloger at Texas A&M University calls “the straight white American male assumption.” Research from Ros shows that about one-tenth of Library of Congress Subject Headings contain the word “men” in the title, compared to the number of subject headings that include “women.”
Ros finds that without gender, race or geographic qualifications subjects containing the word “astronauts” in Library of Congress Subject Headings can be assumed to mean white American men. As Ros illustrates in a 2019 article for The Conversation, “Women are designated with ‘Women astronauts’ and ‘African American women astronauts,’ but there is no subject heading for male astronauts. A book about astronauts who are men would have the general subject ‘Astronauts,’ unless the racial identity prompted the use of a subject like ‘Hispanic American astronauts’ or ‘Indian astronauts.’ Likewise, a book about Russian astronauts would have a geographic subdivision added: ‘Astronauts – Soviet Union’ instead of ‘Russian astronauts.’
As of March 2021, the Library of Congress reported nearly 300,000 Library of Congress Subject Headings, making it the “most comprehensive, non-specialized controlled vocabulary in the English language,” and it’s evolved into organized chaos. With Library of Congress Subject Headings, each heading breaks down the original subject but it becomes chaotic when most subtopics are interconnected to other topics. A single physical book can only be shelved in one place, and the more specific these subjects are, the less likely it is that lesser-known authors will be discovered and that canonized authors will appear. This can make it difficult to find works by various and historically under-represented or misrepresented people unless they look directly for them.
