‘Anything but indifferent’: the Warburg Institute’s Library Classification System

Essay presented in 2016 as fulfillment of requirements for completion of the module INM303 - Information Organisation, part of the MSc Library and Information Science course at City, University of London. Abstract: This essay is a report on The Warburg Institute's Library classification system. It is divided in three parts: first, in 'Background', I present a bit of the history of the Warburg Institute, with a focus on how it is intrinsically related to the thought and research of its founder Aby Warburg; second, in 'The classification system and the library', I describe further the developments of the Institute, including the adoption of the classification scheme, and provide a description of the classification itself; finally, in 'Considerations', I analyse some of the features of the system, make a few comparisons with both the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal systems, and leave some open inquiries as opportunity for further research. From a glance, it is evident that I have made many, long citations. I have found great references from both the creators of the classification system, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, and chose to cite them whenever possible instead of paraphrasing their words, specially Bing's, as I believe the language they used reveals quite a lot about the thought behind the Institute and the classification system itself—and, perhaps, no other classification scheme reflects so much and so well a specific understanding of the world as this one