The Organization of Knowledge in Libraries and the Subject-Approach to Books

Any librarian who has considered books with regard to their contents and the seekers of books with respect to their quests, must have learned, whether selector, classifier, or adviser, that to define, specify and relate the countless subjects and interests is the most complicated and difficult problem in the service of libraries. The opinion that imperfect or confusing classifications can be rendered efficient by means of a correlative alphabetic index to their notations the writer has called “the subject-index illusion.” Notation and index are but correlative to classification; they serve it, they locate groups of books, but they do not organize subjects on book-shelves. Librarians have been so preoccupied with the organization of their services and the economics of their profession that they have had scant time to study this problem of the organization of their collection. Nor have the schools for their training treated this interest educatively on broad grounds with expansive views. Libraries should be organized with more adequate regard to the subject-approach. From these considerations we submit that this book should interest not only classifiers and catalogers but all librarians and bibliographers.