[UA] Magick Schools: Lingomancy

[Timothy Ferguson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ua-admin at lists.uchicago.edu [mailto:ua-admin at lists.uchicago.edu]On
> Behalf Of Nick Wedig
> Sent: Tuesday, 26 June 2001 4:30 AM
> To: ua at lists.uchicago.edu
> Subject: Re: [UA] Magick Schools: Lingomancy
>
>
> >actually this is one of my jobs at the bookshop i work in.
> whenever we get
> >in new books that aren't on the system i have to decide which arbitrary
> >genres and subgenres to poke them in. unfortunately american gods will
> >probably be beyond my evil grasp.
>
> I was specifically thinking of the library of congress
> categorizations printed in with the copyright info.

Not used properly for fiction.

> It seems to
> me that, with however many books there are being printed, there's
> got to be a small government office somewhere devoted entirely to
> that, full of people judging books by their covers* and laying
> down a small portion of the law over any and all books.

Um, yes, that's the LOC for you, but I'd point out that they, and everyone
else, use a distributed system, where we get to use the database in exchange
for credits we are given for adding to the database. (Oh, I'm a librarian -
you see).

LOC is based on the idea that books about the same thing should sit together
on shelves, unlike the previous system.  ("Books which have titles starting
in the same letter should sit together on the shelves")  In Australia we go
even further than LOC, since we use Dewey Decimal Cataloging mostly, which
suggests the universe of human knowledge is divisible into decimalised
chunks.

Now, where's the UA, you ask?  It's here:

The LOC/DDC/UDC systems took over from the monsastic shelf orders - not just
titular order, but the occluded shelving orders mentioned in, for example,
"The Name of the Rose".  The point of occluded shelving order was to keep
the browser ignorant and make the shelver powerful, and since libraries act
as microcosms for the universe of human knowledge, getting thousands of them
and mystically jumbling them up so that only initiates could understand
where everything was is a powerful mystic charm to keep down the plebs.

Then someone comes in and says "Let's tear down the old occlusion systems".
They create a new occlusion system like LOC - which even as a librarian I
can't hold in my head.  They bankroll a rollout of New Model Libraries for
The Betterment of the Common Man.

And then Dewey comes along and say "No, let's go even simpler - take this
you annoying bastards!" and you get the Americans staying LOC and the rest
of the English speaking world going DDC - despite its odd American biases.
Now we have a sort of UDC, which removes the American Imperialism from the
system...

As to odd American biases OK, I'm in Australia so I'm at DDC 994 - "Other
worlds and imaginary places decile 4".  In DDC v.1, Australia simply doesn't
exist, so it's classified in 9 (Geography) 9 (Miscellanea - other worlds and
imaginary worlds) - 4 (Australia).

Well thanks a bunch, Dewey, you handle-bar mustoachioed freak!  No wonder I
have a posterised page of "The Tick" on my wall where the Red Scare trashes
the monument to the creator of the Imperialist cataloguing system Melvil
Dewey.


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