For all you Library Scientists: Some Library Science Fiction

On the flight home from Amsterdam (if you’re wondering where I’ve been
recently) I was reading
a collection of sci-fi short stories
and
came across Rosetta Stone by
Fred Lerner. The story is quite a simple one (in the classic Asimovian “interesting problem, solution” mold) about the discovery of an alien library of Earth books, where nothing is known about the civilisation that collected them. An library scientist is recruited and suggests that analysis of the ordering of the books may be a rich source of information about the society:

“I’ll give you an example. Look at the Dewey Decimal System. Melvil Dewey lived in the United States during the latter part of the nineteeth century: a time and place in which there was a widespread belief in the cultural superiority of American Protestant Christians.”

[...]

“So the Dewey Decimal Classification was – and for that matter still is – heavily biased toward the relative importance of American literature. And even today it devotes twenty times as much attention to Christianity as to Islam, say, or Hinduism. I’ll bet there aren’t many libraries in the Muslim world that arrange their books according to Dewey.”

“What would they use, then?” asked Jack.

“They might use Sardar’s Islamic classification. It’s biased too, but at least the bias is a sympathetic one. And a lot of them use the Library of Congress system. It’s pragmatic, if a bit unwieldy. A true product of the bureaucratic mind.”

“I’d never realised there were so many systems to choose from,” said Colonel Rubin.

“Oh, that’s just three. I can think of lots more. The Russians used to use a ‘Library Bibliographical Classification’ which is supposed to be based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Probably worked as well as anything else derived from Marxist-Leninist theory. My favourite is the Colon Classification. It was invented by an Indian philosopher called Ranganathan. It’s based on the notion that all subjects, if you strip them down to essentials, are made up of five basic elements: personality, matter, energy, space and time. Only a Hindu would have come up with such a scheme. You don’t see it much outside India.”

While it’s basically a lecture dressed up as a story, it’s still a useful
reminder of the cultural biases that can innocuously work their way into
classification systems,
something that is especially
relevant these days. (Oh! I nearly forgot to mention that the same SF
collection has Cory’s fantastic
Visit
The Sins, about how not to treat ADD.)