DDC in Morocco

On the last official day of class with my Cataloging (and Classification) students at ESI, we talked about decimal classification, especially Dewey. DDC has an incredibly strong Western leaning that is often criticized. In Melvil Dewey's system, all knowledge (Western and otherwise) is divided into 10 classes. Each class has 10 sub-classes, and each of these sub-classes also has 10 sub-classes. The numbers can be meaningful beyond that, though, and usually the longer the DDC number, the more detailed the classification.

Of the religion class (the 200s), there is one subclass for religions that are non-Christian (290s). With my cataloging students, we took a look at the section on Islam. The students were pleasantly surprised to see that it's possible to do some number building to make some very "close" or detailed numbers for a variety of Muslim scholars' works. We easily came up with a few very meaningful numbers that had about six digits after the decimal.

The numbers we generated were admittedly long. However, scholars' names were possible to class, and the number-building was adequate. My students were impressed with the system, and frankly, so was I. I know that Jewish communities have created a Jewish decimal classification scheme, and that work is underway to adapt and expand DDC in some Arab-speaking libraries (in Egypt, for one). There decidedly is a need for projects like these, especially when classing a large religious collection.

If an average library from these parts chooses to use straight DDC, it's still going to be able to meet user need to a very admirable and even surprising extent for religion. Well done, DDC editors!