The Dewey Decimal System is problematic in a lot of ways. It's a challenging exercise to try to imagine what a better system might look like (not perfect, just "better"); how it might be constructed, the problems it would have to solve and what might make it user-friendly to online searchers and browsers alike. There's an Open Source Project I read about on Library Thing's "Thingology Blog" that sounds interesting: Open Shelves Classification. An open source approach sounds right to me; I don't think these are problems that one mind, no matter how brilliant, can solve.
The beauty of keeping collections (books, songs, whatever) online is that you don't have to organize or sort them. You just dump it all in. You don't need to put all your mysteries together, or all your rock songs. As long as you have lots of descriptors attached (or tags, or keywords) you can retrieve what you need when you need it. The system is efficient in the virtual world. But how do you get something comparable in a real building, with real books on the shelves and real people; each browsing with very different visions of how the world should be arranged; of what's important and what is incidental?
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