Here at Leeds University Library, a small group is examining the
feasibility of moving from the home-made classification scheme
which is in use for the bulk of our stock to a standard scheme.
Advantages would include spending less time on local
classification and being able to ask suppliers to provide books in
shelf-ready state. Disadvantages would include the costs of
reclassifying and relabelling existing stock, or (if we decided
against doing that) multiple-sequence problems for users.
An examination of the percentage of incoming records from
cataloguing utilities that contain Dewey and LC classmarks has led
us to concentrate on LC as the best option. We have some idea of
the average time spent on classification per book under our present
system, and would like to know how long it takes to classify a
book using LC. Note that we are only interested in classification
time and not in the time spent allocating LCSH.
If anyone has such information, or can point to a source, I would be
most grateful. Please respond to me and I will post a summary to
the list if there is any interest in the results.
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Andrew Cooper, Planning and Projects Officer,
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Tel: 0113-233-5527 Fax: 0113-233-5561
mailto:[log in to unmask]
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