Dewey Number 746.43

That’s the super-secret, indecipherable, not public-friendly library number for “knitting.” There’s talk about how numbers don’t facilitate patrons finding books and then talk about how the heck else you can organize millions of books and display them consistently in libraries large and small without a classification system (that’s library code for “by number”).

A few libraries have started to organize like book stores. Big signs that say stuff like “Travel” and “Mysteries” and then are organized by author. That may turn out to work OK locally, but it will still need to be backed by the super-secret number system, at least, that’s the library concensus.

This may be the best time to slide in there ahead of every American who reads this and say, “Well Amazon manages to do it.” Amazon actually has a super-secret number system, too (known as ISBNs in their case – does anyone other than librarians care about this?) but they put it so far in the background that you only get the number if you look for it (its right there, for those of us who might need it). What Amazon does is make author and title the most important thing you see about the book and they don’t force you to type the author’s name like “Godden, Rumer” instead of just regular Rumer Godden (literary moment: Rumer Godden wrote In This House of Brede, about a British convent of women with true vocations, one of my favorite books). But you do see that typing in names on a Web site and finding them on a shelf are two different things, right? OK, but that is still NO EXCUSE for giving you an error message when you type a name into a library catalog first name first rather than just routing you directly to the author.

Our online catalogs are not as good as Amazon. And really, there is no excuse for that but there is an explanation. Libraries are pretty poor. They’re funded by state and public dollars and those dollars don’t pay for world-class programming. Besides, there’s always Amazon to fall back on, even for librarians. And we do, oh, we do.

Dewey was actually a very interesting personality. He was also a jerk in some ways. But you can check out this biography at Amazon. You can tell by the comments that no one really cares, and even at Amazon I had to search like 8 times to find it and I knew exactly what I was looking for I just couldn’t remember the author.

In any case, the actual point of this entry was to show you this in-joke T-shirt from Cafe Press for library-lover knitters. For a library knitter? Oh my, I can’t tell you how cool this is.

Check it out at:

http://www.cafepress.com/buy/library/-/pv_design_details/pg_1/id_21192558/opt_/fpt_/c_666/

Ah, and as long as we’re back on the topic of Dewey numbers, wanted to pass along the Librarians are Sexy shop at Cafe Press where they have T-shirts that read things like “Get Thee to a Library” and baby bibs that say, “Got 637.1?” (milk) at http://www.cafepress.com/librariansrsexy

And, there’s a comic strip about libraries called “Unshelved” that has merchandise, too, including lime green T-shirts that say, “What Happens at Storytime Stays at Storytime.” I went to get one for a friend who turned 7 this month and they don’t have it in children’s sizes. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT?