Good morning,
We’re in a very similar position to Nicky Ransom at UCA—we have a multi-site, multi-college university in which individual subject librarians still assign classification numbers when they select stock. And each college has a different
way of applying Dewey, so in some cases we may own a single book at each of 6 different colleges, with 6 different numbers assigned! We therefore sorely need a large reclassification project as we try to make our libraries more unified.
Rectifying this will take a tremendous amount of work in terms of logistics and also politically in convincing the college staff to change numbers—right now many of them are convinced that their local application is the best for their users
and they are reluctant to change.
We have recently undergone a restructure, resulting in centralized ordering & cataloguing for all our libraries, so after the dust settles it may be easier to convince college staff to let go of classification. But I think this will probably
have to come down as a top-level decision.
And that’s not even touching on the difficulties of actually editing records and relabeling stock ...
Kate Kluttz
Acquisitions & Metadata Librarian
Library Resources & Systems
University of the Arts London
020 7514 8586