Dewey Has Some Issues

I recently worked on a project to update the Dewey classification of a library's native american collection. The collection had been under 970.3, which is 'History of North America' - 'specific native peoples'. Within this number, they were grouped alphabetically by name of people.

While this system makes it easy to find a certain tribe, it is not without issue. Issue number one being that a lot of the names we use for the various groups are actually offensive. (Basically, as white settlers moved across the country they would ask one tribe what the next tribe over was called. Since many of the peoples were fighting they would say insulting things like "They're snakes!" and the white men would write that down and not question it for hundreds of years.) There has been more effort lately to classify these groups by their preferred names, but it's still an ingrained issue. Another issue with this grouping is that it lumps them all into the pretty generic category of 'History of North America'. Native peoples are absolutely an amazingly important part of the history of North America, but this generic grouping, lumping them all together alphabetically, doesn't do justice to the subject matter and the nuances thereof, especially not the same way Dewey does for colonial history.

One of the existing alternatives, and the one this library switched to, is to group them still under 'History of North America' but instead of stopping there, continuing to group them by geographical region and then language group. This seems like a step in the right direction to me, but we're not totally there yet. On the plus side, this groups native peoples in with other geographically relevant events and helps provide context. If you're someone that pays attention to details in Dewey numbers, this also helps indicate which people share language groups and can provide insight that way. The first issue we run into using this classification method, is that Dewey's geographical separations do not line up with native peoples. For instance, several groups settled in New Mexico and Arizona. The way Dewey is separated, New Mexico is 978 and Arizona is 979. Since you can't put one book under two numbers, it has to go up a level to just 'United States', which pulls the people out of that important context we were trying to create. Plus, separating nomadic people geographically is always going to be a problem and leads to information on these groups being spread out all over depending on which group and when you're talking about. This all adds to the problem of native peoples getting lost in the shuffle.

I guess part of my issue with all of this is that we're still lumping them all into history. While I will grant that books about settling the country or historical events do belong in the context of history, it seems that anything written about native peoples gets put in history, even if it's about the people today.

Taking on a project like this also brings to light some of the other issues with Dewey classification that really cause problems. When constructing the part of the number to specify language group, you're looking under 'specific ethnic and national groups', under this there is an option for 'North Americans' which then includes 'people of United States'. Seems legit, right? The problem is that this group of 'people of United States' is only people of British origin. In order to find native peoples, you have go from 'specific ethnic and national groups' to 'other ethnic and national groups' and then you get 'North American native peoples'. Other. They're classified as other. They're classified as other North Americans instead of just North Americans. This is a problem! This is just one example of the ways that Dewey delegates whole groups or topics to footnotes because they weren't important to a white guy in the 1870s.

The Dewey Decimal System has been updated and expanded many times since it's invention in 1876 (thank goodness). And I do think it's helpful to have some sort of classification system, but the scope is an issue. At the moment, no one seems to have come up with a grand solution, so people are trying to tweak the system from the inside, or use their own version of the rules, or even throwing out the rules altogether. Xwi7xwa library in British Columbia took the books on indigenous peoples out of the Dewey system and group them based on the way those people organize information in an attempt to combat that Western, colonial bias. We need more people experimenting like this and working together to build a better system.