Gillian Bartoo is the District Cataloger for Cambridge Public Schools in Cambridge, MA.
Why do books about the struggle for civil rights in America end up in social sciences (3XX) rather than history (97X)? The same way lots of books end up in “weird” places in school libraries: the original cataloger followed the rules for assigning Dewey call numbers. The most basic rule is that you catalog to describe the content of the book and to fit that content into an imaginary library of all published knowledge using the scheme Dewey laid out. It means catalogers don’t consider the intended audience, the context in which a work might be used, or where any given individual might expect to find it shelved. Often, this does not bode well for small, specialized libraries such as our school libraries which carry books with simplified content that caters to a young and still intellectually developing patron group.