LET A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM: creating
alternative classification systems
Nandita Gandhi
Introduction
The invariable question asked is “Why do we need an alternative classification system
for a library if there are already established ones?” We would like to present a case for
the encouragement of alternative systems and allowing them a place in the formal
library classification system structure. The paper is divided into the following
sections. Firstly, we take up the theoretical and institutional context of classification
systems. Secondly, we show that by deconstructing the traditional classification
system and pointing to its problems and lacunae we establish the necessity for
alternative ones. Thirdly, we put forward an example of an alternative one, the
Akshara Classification System and its main features. Information is now available in
more formats, so in the conclusion we appeal for a formal recognition of different
classification systems for different requirements.
More than Just Tools
The common belief is that libraries are the gateways to information. They provide a
variety of information and leave it to the users to determine what to make of it. This
makes them transcend politics, or brands of political beliefs and therefore neutral/
objective in its function. In actuality, this argument disguises and hides its own
politics. Libraries emerge from a historical and ideological context; they are
established for a purpose and their functioning, choice of material and its
classification represent an ideological standpoint. For example the early university
libraries of the colonial period were meant to advance the British framework of
education and for producing an educated class of Indians for the administrative
services. On the other hand, small documentation centres, which emerged from the
progressive movements of the 1970s and 1980s had as their main plank the provision
of specific information and viewpoints from a liberal and Left perspective as well as
bring to centre stage marginalized groups of oppressed peoples like dalits, women,
tribals and workers.
Neutrality and objectivity are highly contested and critiqued terms. Objectivity
has never existed in a pure sense and has had different meanings and political uses
throughout history. Different, even opposing political groups have made claims to
objectivity (Harding, 1993). The Left viewpoint believes that society is dominated by
the ideology of the powerful ruling classes, which marginalizes the working classes.
Dr. Ambedkar, the leader of the Dalits, had analysed society from the standpoint of
those at the bottom of the caste system. For our purposes it would be more meaningful
to speak of who or which group is likely to be more objective than others? Women
form half of society but do not have an equal position or representation in its different
institutions. The ‘Other(s)’ is likely to present a different version of reality. The
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marginalized and oppressed are then more likely to be ‘objective’ as they have little
stake in the present status quo and power structures.
Like theories, a library’s classification system provides a framework for the
representation of knowledge, choice of positioning and usage of current semantics. By
deconstructing a particular classification system, we can come to its inherent
theoretical biases. This is not a new notion but is at the core of all social sciences.
When sociologists analyse the behaviour of a group of people, they assign
characteristics from their own perspective and culture. When anthropologists call a
particular tribe ‘primitive’, they have a scale of ‘civilisations’ in mind. Scores of
library science students who have been trained in or read Ranganathan’s thesis see
classification as “mapping the universe of knowledge” (1950). The choice of
categories or classes will reflect streams of thought, ideology and politics. For
example, there could be an emphasis on the caste system or a relative indifference by
placing it amongst several sub classes. Both are a choice and both show a theoretical
bias.
Problem Systems
In 1987, we established Akshara in order to make available material with a bias on
women, women’s issues and struggles. As part of the several campaigns against
violence against women, we found that there was a dearth of literature and data on
women and that new material was not being included in established libraries. There
was an abundance of new women’s fiction from detective thrillers to science fiction to
humour, which did not make it to the popular circulating libraries. Feminist theory did
not find a place in university libraries till much later. We needed a classification
system for our small collection to be organised and open for public use. Since we had
a trained librarian amongst the founder members of Akshara, our first reaction was
trying out the traditional classification system, the Dewey Decimal Classification
(DDC), used in most Indian libraries 1.
Mevil Dewey, an American mathematician developed the Dewey Decimal
Classification System in the mid 1800s. Very soon it became an international standard
classification, especially suited for the natural sciences and mostly used in academic
libraries. Its set of three volumes is quite expensive and requires a trained librarian.
Both the DDC and the Library of Congress Classification System are enumerative
systems developed to arrange printed matter in topical or disciplinary categories i.e. to
position books related to the same or similar subjects next to each other.
Our attempts at organisation of our material with the DDC (16th edition) soon
ran into some serious roadblocks 2. Firstly, we found it Euro centric or revolving
around an Anglo Saxon worldview of events and understanding. For instance, the
class Religion (Class No. 200) which has 10 sub-classes, reserves eight for
Christianity, one for Natural Theology and only one sub-class for all other religions,
i.e. 290. This is a good demonstration of the myth of neutrality. Neither Dewey nor
the later classification specialists thought that other great religions like Islam and
Hinduism required more sub-classes. Similarly, in Literature (Class 800), eight subclasses are reserved for western literature (810-880), i.e. American, English, German,
French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, while just one (890) is meant to club all the
other literatures of the world.
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Secondly, the DDC with great gender insensitivity shuttles women into the sub
classification of 390 as 396 – Woman: Comprehensive Works including Feminism.
This class is further divided by the use of some anachronistic terms like:
396.1 - Emancipation of Women instead of women’s rights
396.2 - Legal Status of Women, incl. Property Rights instead of Personal Laws
396.3 - Careers of Women instead of women’s employment
396.6 - Women in the Home instead of women’s domestic labour
Thirdly, Dewey’s deep social conservatism is reflected in treating unmarried
mothers as social problems e.g.
362.83 - Women's social problems
362.839 - Specific problems
362.839 2 - Unmarried mothers
There is a sub class number 301.424 which is meant to bring together all
material regarding ‘sexes in society’. It clubs together celibacy, premarital relations,
adultery and homosexuality. The logic of the sub class being any material with
something to do with sex! This is carried further by putting prostitution as 301.424 3.
Lastly, we found the DDC extremely cumbersome to use especially without
trained librarians. Women Workers is given the number 331.4 and further divided as:
331.4
Women Workers
331.42
Wages
331.43
Employed Married Women
331.48
Women employed in specific occupations
331.481 - In Professions, service and minor industries
331.482 to 331.489 8 - In major industries
The sub-classification of women's labour in specific industries involves a
complicated process whereby numbers of specific industries are combined with the
base numbers 331.481 and 331.482. So we have:
women social workers would be classified in 331.481 361, or
women in aircraft industries - 331.482 913 3, or
women in agricultural labour - 331.48 63
women in agricultural labour in India - 331.48 63 954.
The result is long class numbers, which are unwieldy to write, remember and
locate. A slight error in classifying or shelving would cause the book to be mis-placed
and lost to users.
We have taken examples from the 16th edition as we had access to it and it is
the most commonly used one in most libraries. Those with resources to buy the later
editions may not want to spend the time reclassifying their material. It can be argued
that several changes have been incorporated since that edition. The 1971 or 18th
edition had made several modifications but they seem insignificant especially in the
context of the international women’s movement and the proliferation of feminist
literature in the USA at that time. It includes prostitution in Sex Offences - 364.153,
clubbing it together with rape, adultery, seduction and acts of perversion. Similarly
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homosexuality is classed in 301.415 7, which is the class number for extramarital and
abnormal sexual relations. Whilst there is a special class number for sexual behaviour
of single women - 301.417 6423, and for the sexual behaviour of widows - 301.417
6444 2, there is none for the issue of wife beating.
The 19th (1979) and 20th (1989) edition of the DDC made important changes.
For example the 19th edition introduced “wife abuse” as well as “discrimination
against women workers”. The 20th edition gave a class number for “Institutions
pertaining to relations of the sexes” which included extramarital relations,
homosexual marriage, prostitution by males, prostitution by females; and also sexual
orientation or heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality. The Family also
included single-parent families. However, for us the inherent theoretical bias was
against the very principles we stood for as a feminist organisation. Additionally the
expense of purchasing its costly editions, hiring a trained librarian, and the drudgery
of long class numbers was beyond the scope of small voluntary organisations.
We were aware that there was a movement of alternatives, which questioned
the dominant universalist traditional classification systems. The most well known was
Ranganathan’s faceted classification, which subdivided broader elements into single
concepts as well as had the ability to add new elements. It was more suited for the
natural sciences than a small collection mainly dealing with the social sciences. There
were the smaller, alternative ones, which emerged in the 1970s within documentation
centres associated with social movements. The International Organisation of
Consumers Unions, later renamed Consumers International, developed the Thesaurus
of Consumer Terms in 1979. It serves as a tool for information retrieval on subjects,
which goes beyond the role of consumer in the market place. It includes medicine,
social welfare, transport, housing, environment, etc., practically every aspect of a
person's life. The Socially Appropriate Technology International Information Services
was designed and used by people working on appropriate technologies for popular
development in 1979 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The core elements of their
classification focus on socially appropriate systems, techniques, equipment, resources
for the production of relevant goods, services and ideas in a human environment. The
Centre for Education and Documentation based in Mumbai had developed its own
indigenous classification in 1979 with an emphasis on struggles and movements. Most
of these alternative classification had a specific agenda, theoretical bias and user
group in mind and was therefore not suited for our material which was based on
feminist principles and the women’s movement to be used by women, activists and
students.
The Akshara Classification System
The Akshara Classification System (ACS) makes its bias very clear, it is partisan to
feminism and its understanding of women and society. Feminism consists of broad
streams of thought and many schools of ideology and strategies Generally, feminism
can be defined as an awareness and understanding of unequal gender relations in
society, at the workplace and within the family by systems of control and patriarchy
and the conscious action to change this situation. Its starting point is “women” with
all their differences like caste, class, race, ethnicity, age and sexual preference. It also
includes “agency” i.e. women are not only victims of oppression but also active
agents who desire to change their lives. And as half the world’s population, all issues
involve women and not only gender specific ones like violence and reproductive
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rights. It follows that we do not subscribe to the biology determinist inequality of
women, the gender based role theory, and to the ‘natural’ order of hierarchy between
the sexes, class, caste or race.
Whilst keeping our theoretical framework in mind, we had also to consider the
nature of NGOs, their lack of resources, trained personnel and specific objectives. It
followed that whatever system we devised had to be women oriented but take both
general and gender specific material. It had to accommodate different feminist
ideologies, which explained women’s oppression and strategies for action and
struggle. Besides women, it also had to include other oppressed sections of society
and men and masculinity. It had to be flexible to change and easy for expansion. As
NGOs could not afford too many people, the system had to be easy to operate by
untrained staff and at the same time be user friendly.
These structural issues were taken into account by giving the ACS an alpha
numeral notation for subjects and sub class divisions. The alphabet used has some
association to the subject e.g. H can be easily associated with Health or C with
Communications. Whenever that was not possible as in the case of Ecology we used
A so it can be associated with air and K could be phonetically be associated with
Culture. This is an easy to remember method. Each subject is divided by means of
numerals or three digits.
C
C 100
C 200
C 300
C 400
Communications and Media
Communications: Theory, Data, Analysis
Media
Publishing
Informatics
The three digits can be further sub divided by hundreds and tens.
C 210
C 211
Mass Media
Radio
C 220
C 221
Portrayal of women in media
Portrayal of women in radio
The ACS is flexible enough to accommodate material, which require broad
and in depth classification. Centres specialising in certain subjects, say human rights,
can use it by expanding one section but maintaining the others.
The theoretical issues were at the level of selection of material and
classification. In order to avoid the Euro or India-centric trap, we had to be conscious
of selecting material from different regions. We need to ask ourselves the question
how much material do we have from Bangladesh or Africa? And do we have class
numbers for this material? Secondly, the ACS does not ghettoise women’s subjects
into one class number. Every subject is seen as a women’s issue. New terminology is
not a fad; they have replaced old ones as a result of critical studies and new material.
The ACS began with a set of terms and has kept replacing them as they have changed.
The ACS is informed by feminist analysis but this too has not been static. For
example, we have critiqued the DDC for perceiving prostitution as a ‘social problem’.
Whose problem is it, the male clients, the women prostitutes or society as it tolerates
the institution? How do we define the term prostitution? We need to clarify our
theoretical position. The ACS places prostitution in the subject Violence based on the
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belief that women are overtly or otherwise pressurised into prostitution. But what of
the call girls who willingly engage in prostitution as a contract or profession? So the
ACS has also give it a place in Labour as prostitutes can be considered ‘sex workers’.
The issue can, alternatively, find a place in the subject – Sexuality.
Concluding Thoughts
Libraries and classifications systems are not as innocent of political or theoretical
content as we generally believe. Instead of debating whether they are capable of being
neutral or objective, perhaps we need to shift our question to – who or which group is
likely to be more objective? Classification systems are not like theories rather they
are theories, which present a framework for the representation of knowledge. We
have critiqued the Dewey Decimal Classification as it is most widely used in India
and most training institutions concentrate mainly on it. Our critique raises important
issues of Euro-centrism and gender insensitivity.
The Akshara Classification System has attempted to overcome the structural
and theoretical issues, which have emerged in this critique in the context of women’s
issues. It does have its own limitations as it is mainly suited for small collections and
for social science themes. We devised this system as an alternative when none were
available. We do not posit it as the answer to the problems of formal systems. Rather
as a demonstration that alternatives need to be created to meet a variety of demands.
In India, especially we have the domination of a few traditional systems and we have
not challenged their claims of universalism. Ranganathan’s path breaking work has
not seen any successors and the reasons could lie in our methods of teaching library
science and our mindset of accepting formulated systems.
Today Library Science is receding into the pages of history as Information
Science is taking over. The computer and the Internet has opened up vistas of
information and created new problems of classification and retrieval. As the first step
of progressing into that arena of dialogue and new creations, we have to give up our
dependence on traditional systems. 3 This does not mean we do not use the DDC but
not view it as the only relevant one to be used without a theoretical critique.
Familiarity with other larger and smaller classifications will give students of Library
Science the ability to shift from one to the other with ease. Students are rarely given
assignments to create their own systems for a variety of subjects as well as material in
different formats like the Net, music or postage stamps. Such exercises are commonly
used amongst law students who are made to experiment with designing new laws on
social issues. By encouraging a thousand flowers to bloom, we are encouraging
experiments, alternatives and discussion on classification systems to flourish. Lastly,
another change can be made within libraries. Classification is seen as a mechanical
task after a certain amount of training. Rather it is an intellectual task, which requires
discussion and dialogue between classifiers. This forum needs to be formed and/or
strengthened for the constant revision of systems.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harding, 1993 “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity?’
in L. Alcoff and E. Potter (ed.) Feminist Epistimologies, Routledge, New York, USA
Ranganathan, S. R. 1950. Classification, Coding and Machinery for Search.
UNESCO/NS/SL/3, Paris, 30 June 1950. Paris: UNESCO.
1
Lakshmi Menon, a trained librarian, was one of the founder members of Akshara. She was
instrumental in giving the name akshara and in devising the akshara classification system along with
Nandita Gandhi. Her views were first presented in a paper “Classification Systems: Need, Rationale
and Basis” at the Documentation Centres Meet at Goa in 1986.
2
This part of the paper is based on the material in The Akshara Handbook: an alternative classification
and documentation system by Lakshmi Menon and Nandita Gandhi, Akshara Publications, 1995
The University of Mumbai’s Bachelor of Library Science course lists the Dewey Decimal
Classification, the Universal Decimal Classification, the Colon Classification and a comparison
between them under different schemes. Then there is a small section and a few hours devoted to other
approaches.
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