The Armored Rose

[celticdragonfly]

My dear SCA friends - I need to find a Dewey Decimal number for The Armored Rose, ISBN 0-9669399-0-5. My usual sources did find it, but only with a Library of Congress number. This one, I know I am not going to be able to go to my local library for help with. Anyone know? Feel free to pass this around.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It may not have a Dewey Decimal number assigned to it. WorldCat shows only one library that holds it, the Library of Congress, which means that it hasn't been cataloged at any library that contributes cataloging.

You may need to work out a good DDN yourself. :)

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

In that case I am in serious trouble. I so don't understand how they really set DD#s. I mean, one of Stephen J. Gould's collections of essays comes up as 508 - another later collection of essays, from the SAME column in the SAME magazine - comes up as 575. WTF? And there's lots of Karl's books that go by that I'm wondering why this one went here and the other went there.

Plus, it's an odd little book - I am not sure what to think of it.

Sigh. I'd like to be a librarian, but I have to admit I don't understand Dewey well enough.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The reason it does that is most likely that it was cataloged by two different libraries. Cataloging is an art, rather than a science, and no two catalogers does it in quite the same way. :) I interned a few weeks copy cataloging at the University Park Library - that means copying and pasting cataloging info from a database we subscribed to rather than doing original cataloging - and some of them drove me crazy. There was stuff that should have gone into Art History, IMNSHO, that ended up in History or Travel, and stuff that should have been in Anthropology in Travel, and vice versa.

But since it's your personal library, you can just wait until everything else is up, pick the area where you think it ought to be, and put that number on it.

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

What you could do is look up other books on similar subjects and see where they are in the DDC.

I looked up your book and found a description of it at http://www.florilegium.org/files/COMBAT/f-fighters-msg.html

Using this information I looked on the catalog for the consortium my library belongs to, and found books on armor at 623.4 (weapons and military engineering -- in our library it tends to be mostly firearms), 399 (costuming!), and 355.009 (military history). So you can take your choice.
I think I'd cut that last one short and just use 355, which is the general number for things military.

Or you could go for the combat-as-sport aspect, which would put it in 796.8, martial arts, with boxing, karate, etc. Fencing is mostly 796.86, but there's a (modern translation of a) medieval manual of swordfighting at 355.547, whihc may come closer to SCA purposes. (Note that the latter is not at my library, but another library in our system.)

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

But since it's your personal library, you can just wait until everything else is up, pick the area where you think it ought to be, and put that number on it.

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, what librarians are doing, only substituting "my institution" for "my personal library."

The underlying principle is that the Dewey reflects the subject heading. Once you've determined the primary subject heading (the restriction of the card catalog no longer requires it, but it's useful discipline) by picking three terms that describe it, you decide with which other books it most likely belongs by comparing what other libraries with similar books have done.

From that point on you "build" a dewey number along various rules which, if you still need me to, I will do for you when I get back from my All Bunnybright Grandparental Dog and Pony Show Tour.

:-)