Article
J. Bradford Young
Music libraries classify and arrange their collections by content according to one of several systems. The M schedule of the Library of Congress (LC) Classification, developed by oscar g.t. Sonneck in 1902, is the most widely used. It was taken up by many other libraries to reduce cataloging costs, when the Library of Congress increased the distribution of its printed catalog cards. The Dewey decimal classification (DDC), still in use especially in public libraries, did not distinguish music from music literature until 1958 (16th edition), by which time many libraries had abandoned it. The 1989 edition (20th edition) of the DDC included a wholly new schedule for music, which is highly faceted with a capacity for synthesis. Complex topics, such as German Baroque choral cantatas for Christmas, can be expressed. This feature has, to date, attracted little interest in the United States. A previous multi-faceted scheme, devised in 1938 by George Sherman Dickinson for the scores of Vassar College, although adapted at Columbia University and SUNY Buffalo, is not widely used. Some research libraries established before ...
