Implications of broadening the current classification system at Wellington City Libraries

Abstract

Recently staff at Wellington City Libraries have questioned whether the collection could be more broadly classified by reducing the DDC notation, thus saving money and time. This research examines the implications of broadening the DDC notation at the main branch of Wellington City Libraries. Implications for the purposes of this study are the effect changing the current system will have on browsing and known-item retrieval. By comparing the current system to schemes where notation is truncated to two and three places after the decimal place, ramifications are considered. In order to quantify the implications the scattering of documents in the broader systems and the size of clusters of documents in the same call mark are measured. A breakdown of how the change will impact on different areas of the collection is provided. This research concludes that reducing notation to three places is an option with the exception of some classes. Moreover, the implication on known-item searching was found to be minimal in both of the broader schemes. However when truncated to just two places, the effect on browsing is too adverse to be a viable option for the library.