Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract
On first reading the list of speakers proposed for this institute, I
became aware of being rather the "odd man out" for two reasons. Firstly, I
was asked to present a paper on PRECIS which is very much a verbal
indexing system-at a conference dominated by contributions on classification
schemes with a natural bias, as the centenary year approaches, toward the
Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). Secondly, I feared (quite wrongly, as it
happens) that I might be at variance with one or two of my fellow speakers,
who would possibly like to assure us, in an age when we can no longer ignore
the computer, that traditional library schemes such as DDC and Library of
Congress Classification (LCC) are capable of maintaining their original
function of organizing collections of documents, and at the same time are also
well suited to the retrieval of relevant citations from machine-held files. In
this context, I am reminded of a review of a general collection of essays on
classification schemes which appeared in the Journal of Documentation in
1972. Norman Roberts, reviewing the papers which dealt specifically with the
well established schemes, deduced that "all the writers project their particular
schemes into the future with an optimism that springs, perhaps, as much from
a sense of emotional involvement as from concrete evidence." Since I do not
believe that these general schemes can play any significant part in the retrieval
of items from mechanized files, it appeared that I had been cast in the role of
devil's advocate.published or submitted for publicatio
