Re: Special vs general schemes

Thanks to Kathryn and Aida for the background on Ranganathan. I hadn't 
meant to slight him as a person; I was invoking him as commonly-spouted 
theory, which is hardly fair to him.

I'll defer to the more educated on whether Ranganathan's work grew out of a 
concern with biology, but I find that early classification work often 
revolved around biology, a science that needed it. The original "taxonomy" 
was that of species and speciation. Even today, insights like E.O. Wilson's 
on relevant classification techniques (see "The Diversity of Life") warrant 
consideration. But I wonder if I'm confusing the issue here.

My original point was that there is no general facet schema that can 
productively be brought to an organizer, human or computer, as a schema to 
classify a given set of resources. Nor can it be a useful framework for 
extension, unless by "extension" you mean "assign a meaning to this facet, 
which didn't have a meaning before."

The general facets don't have enough inherent meaning to be useful, and it 
defeats the purpose of common facets for one system to "adapt" such a 
scheme to its own purpose, because then two systems using the same 
"general" schema will not interoperate properly -- meanings have been 
unpredictably altered.

>[Kathryn La Barre:]
>of a new universal classification just as Bliss had done with the Bliss
>Bibliographic Classification. The principles set forth by these men
>are not confined to library use or library contexts.

The BC isn't universal, because a store selling chairs can't use it. (I 
haven't perused the BC to see if it does, in fact, have a subclass of 
categories specifically for chairs, but if it did, I'd just have to find an 
example for which the BC has no subclass. Can it organize my home 
finances?) Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't even include 
categories for physical characteristics of information -- like the height 
of a book, which is a key facet for bookstores and some libraries.

Facet analysis itself, on the other hand, is an excellent tool and set of 
rules for creating a facet schema for a set of resources. And of course a 
useful facet schema can be made to classify other facets. It'll be just as 
useful as one made to classify any other kind of information or any other 
kind of object. I've got no argument with any of that.

>[Aida Slavic:]
>But when talking about general categories we
>don't talk about PMEST (5 facets) any more, we rather accept
>CRG suggestion of 13.

Since we had to revise PMEST when it became unsuitable, don't you suppose 
we'll have to revise the new set of 13 whenever it's unsuitable? CRG does 
acknowledge that those 13 are standards for "classical" facet analysis, so 
I don't think they regard them as a "universal" system either. Anyway, I 
was under the impression that CRG shares my opinion: that there are no 
general categories (their "Principle of Fundamental Categories").

I totally agree that we're making some progress on the tool of facet 
analysis, but I don't see that it can be applied to create a general facet 
scheme that everyone can use for their resource collections. I think people 
will have to use facet analysis themselves on their own resource 
collections. That's the difference.

I don't believe in a Grand Unified Theory of physics either :)

Travis


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