Tuesday Thinger: Open Shelves Classification

Welcome to another week of Tuesday Thingers! We always love to hear from regular participants as well as new people.

A special thanks goes out to Katherine, who sent me an email and brought this week's question to my attention. Library Thing is attempting to gain help from librarians and readers alike to redo the old Dewey Decimal system of book classification, creating a newer system called Open Shelves Classification or OSC (click on the link to read a little about the vision on the LT Blog).

If I read correctly, the librarians have already helped to create the main categories, and they are now looking for readers to help classify books.

How we can help: As you add a book or review to your library, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can see the grid of classifications, select the classification for that book and confirm that you have read it. They have also created a group for the OSC project.

Today's question: Prior to today, were you aware of Open Shelves Classification? Have you helped to classify any books yet? Is this something you are interested in? Did you know that if you classify any books, it will also show you who else has classified the book?

Update: I just checked, and the grid has disappeared. Most of the questions can still be answered, and if you are interested in the function, make sure you watch for the grid to re-appear!

My Answer: This week was the first week I was aware of OSC. I have now classified about 7 or 8 books that are currently on my bookshelf or will be shortly.

I am interested in seeing what happens with this project as I never completely understood how the Dewey system was organized. That said, I would love to see some type of system to help organize fiction into different categories. I'd love to be able to walk into a library and go to a section that had a large selection of historical fiction or mystery books for me to browse without having to search in a computer. Yikes - it has been so long since I've been to a library, maybe I'm saying something stupid here. . .

I was so excited to add the classification of The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff under Fiction and to find that one other person had also classified it there. :) I keep adding classifications so I can see if anyone else has added them yet.

Looking forward to reading everyone's answers!!

~ Wendi

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