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NYPL’s Reading Room No Longer in a Class by ItselfSome 25,000 reference books in the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library are getting a new classification system this year. Since the 1890s, the Reading Room collection has been arranged according to a unique scheme developed by the Research Libraries’ first director, Dr. John Shaw Billings, a physician who had directed the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office for 30 years and established the Index Medicus in 1879.But library officials felt it was time for a change from a system used only by NYPL, and starting this summer they began converting the reference collection to the Library of Congress classification. “We have a history of a classification system that doesn’t make a lot of intuitive sense to the user community,” Research Libraries Director David S. Ferriero said in the August 17 New York Times. Denise A. Hibay, assistant chief librarian for collection development, told American Libraries that the project team had just finished LC’s A class in mid-August and she expected the switch to LC to be completed by July 2007. “In addition to changing the class mark, we are also bar-coding each book, which will result in better inventory control,” she added. “We obtained special funding for one year for three full-time library technical assistants to help the humanities and social-sciences bibliographers, who are doing the bulk of the work.” Hibay said that patrons have enthusiastically supported the change, even those readers who had gotten used to the locations of their favorite reference books. “An unexpected side benefit to this change,” she noted, “is that some readers are discovering that many of our reference sources are available online, such as the Biography and Genealogy Master Index.” The closed stacks of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library—as well as the closed stacks of other NYPL collections—use a fixed-order shelving scheme, developed in 1956 and based on each book’s size, that maximizes the libraries’ limited space. However, Hibay said that other open-stack reading rooms in the building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street are also considering a change to LC once the major project is over. The Science, Industry, and Business Library has used LC for its open collections since its move to Madison Avenue in 1996, while the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts use the Billings scheme. NYPL’s 86 branches use the Dewey Decimal Classification. Posted August 18, 2006. |
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