Albert picked up a blue ball and headed for the blue pile. Then he stopped. Should it go in the round, roll-y pile instead? Or maybe the big pie?
from A Mousy Mess
written by Laura Driscoll
illustrated by Deborah Melmon
Kane Press, 2014
I fell asleep Thursday night wondering what my Tuesday Blog topic would be. I dreamed I was lost in a fictional place that included a library. I entered easily and saw some people I knew. Getting out again was causing a problem, though. I was lost and only a particular Dewey Decimal number could show me the way out.
Who dreams of Dewey numbers?! Who even thinks of them during the daytime?
My dreambrain kept chanting 796.57. Over and over and over. When I woke up, much relieved to find myself in my warm bed next to my husband (who also was not lost in my dream anymore), I reached for my phone (which is so much more than a phone) and clicked open my library app. The number I typed in was sure to be a forehead slapper. But it wasn’t. Not only were no books listed in 796.57, the closest match was Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong at 796.5 and 796.5092.
Without getting overly deep in the weeds, 092 is the Dewey mark for biography, so those libraries that added the suffix call attention to the autobiographical nature of the work.
Also, listed in 796.52 is John Krakauer’s famous true account of the tragedy on Mount Everest.
I was left with a phantom catalog number for a subject (something like Winter Survival Mountain Hiking?) I know nothing about.
Weird.
First off, let me make it clear that while I like to keep my life uncluttered, tidy, and in good order, I’m not always successful. I’m no Melvil Dewey. I bet he had no idea that his idea to organize library materials would morph into the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) that is used all over the world to organize all the world’s knowledge.
Melvil Dewey graduated from Amherst College in 1874 and was immediately hired by the college to reclassify its materials collections. Until his tenure, books were sorted by size or color or when they were acquired, not necessarily by content. Each library had its own system.
I started thinking about categories of knowledge and how to sort, in a general way, and remembered “Twenty Questions,” a game I played when I was young. I played with my kids and grandkids, too. Animal/Vegetable/Mineral are the usual categories. When my younger granddaughter tried to get people to guess her answer Unicorn, her mom added “Imaginary,” to their category list.
Dewey went deeper than Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral though. Using ten well-defined categories, he divided each into well-developed hierarchies and a rich network of relationships among their various topics.
But Melvil Dewey is not the only classifier.
We all categorize. I organize my spice cupboard alphabetically. I know some people who group the spices they use often away from the ones they don’t use as much. Still other people might choose the size and shape of the container. The object of sorting things, no matter what they are, is to make it easy to find them again.
When young students came to my library on a field trip, I told them the call number on the spine of a book is its address. Use it to find out where a book lives on the shelves.
And maybe more importantly, if you don’t know a book’s address, don’t put it back willy-nilly on a shelf. Librarians and other staff spend countless hours finding lost materials.
“Like goes with like” is a phrase you might hear in the library world. It’s all about being able to find stuff.
And how about Carl Linnaeus? His General Taxonomy is also systematic. Moving from the most general to the most specific, all living beings can be described in microscopic detail.
I do like order.
But when Kamala Harris tells us our similarities as humans are more important than our differences, it doesn’t have anything to do with sorting or organizing spices on a shelf or describing the difference between an enormous blue whale or the teeny krill it eats by the ton every day. It won’t help anyone tell the difference between butter and a butterfly or an elephant and an elephant ear.
Our similarities are what make us human. We all need clean food, sturdy shelter, and adequate clothing. We need to nurture and be nurtured. We need the common languages of love and music and emotion. We need shared memories and a way to communicate them with each other. We need contentment with what we have while maintaining hope for something better. We need to dream and believe that we can make our own and each other’s dreams come true.
Some people, like my younger daughter, are natural catalogers. They see similarities and group them easily. Finding similarities leads to acceptance, growth, and understanding.
Like with like, as they say.
I’m reading The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens (Seventh Street Books, 2014). I don’t usually choose murder mysteries, but this one is on my daughter’s book club’s reading list. A college student, assigned to write a biography, chooses an elderly resident in a nursing home. He learns about a murder, a cover-up, and the past he and his subject try to keep secret from themselves. Recommended.
Be curious! (and embrace similarities
when and where you find them)
from A Mousy Mess
written by Laura Driscoll
illustrated by Deborah Melmon
Kane Press, 2014
I fell asleep Thursday night wondering what my Tuesday Blog topic would be. I dreamed I was lost in a fictional place that included a library. I entered easily and saw some people I knew. Getting out again was causing a problem, though. I was lost and only a particular Dewey Decimal number could show me the way out.
Who dreams of Dewey numbers?! Who even thinks of them during the daytime?
My dreambrain kept chanting 796.57. Over and over and over. When I woke up, much relieved to find myself in my warm bed next to my husband (who also was not lost in my dream anymore), I reached for my phone (which is so much more than a phone) and clicked open my library app. The number I typed in was sure to be a forehead slapper. But it wasn’t. Not only were no books listed in 796.57, the closest match was Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong at 796.5 and 796.5092.
Without getting overly deep in the weeds, 092 is the Dewey mark for biography, so those libraries that added the suffix call attention to the autobiographical nature of the work.
Also, listed in 796.52 is John Krakauer’s famous true account of the tragedy on Mount Everest.
I was left with a phantom catalog number for a subject (something like Winter Survival Mountain Hiking?) I know nothing about.
Weird.
First off, let me make it clear that while I like to keep my life uncluttered, tidy, and in good order, I’m not always successful. I’m no Melvil Dewey. I bet he had no idea that his idea to organize library materials would morph into the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) that is used all over the world to organize all the world’s knowledge.
Melvil Dewey graduated from Amherst College in 1874 and was immediately hired by the college to reclassify its materials collections. Until his tenure, books were sorted by size or color or when they were acquired, not necessarily by content. Each library had its own system.
I started thinking about categories of knowledge and how to sort, in a general way, and remembered “Twenty Questions,” a game I played when I was young. I played with my kids and grandkids, too. Animal/Vegetable/Mineral are the usual categories. When my younger granddaughter tried to get people to guess her answer Unicorn, her mom added “Imaginary,” to their category list.
Dewey went deeper than Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral though. Using ten well-defined categories, he divided each into well-developed hierarchies and a rich network of relationships among their various topics.
But Melvil Dewey is not the only classifier.
We all categorize. I organize my spice cupboard alphabetically. I know some people who group the spices they use often away from the ones they don’t use as much. Still other people might choose the size and shape of the container. The object of sorting things, no matter what they are, is to make it easy to find them again.
When young students came to my library on a field trip, I told them the call number on the spine of a book is its address. Use it to find out where a book lives on the shelves.
And maybe more importantly, if you don’t know a book’s address, don’t put it back willy-nilly on a shelf. Librarians and other staff spend countless hours finding lost materials.
“Like goes with like” is a phrase you might hear in the library world. It’s all about being able to find stuff.
And how about Carl Linnaeus? His General Taxonomy is also systematic. Moving from the most general to the most specific, all living beings can be described in microscopic detail.
I do like order.
But when Kamala Harris tells us our similarities as humans are more important than our differences, it doesn’t have anything to do with sorting or organizing spices on a shelf or describing the difference between an enormous blue whale or the teeny krill it eats by the ton every day. It won’t help anyone tell the difference between butter and a butterfly or an elephant and an elephant ear.
Our similarities are what make us human. We all need clean food, sturdy shelter, and adequate clothing. We need to nurture and be nurtured. We need the common languages of love and music and emotion. We need shared memories and a way to communicate them with each other. We need contentment with what we have while maintaining hope for something better. We need to dream and believe that we can make our own and each other’s dreams come true.
Some people, like my younger daughter, are natural catalogers. They see similarities and group them easily. Finding similarities leads to acceptance, growth, and understanding.
Like with like, as they say.
I’m reading The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens (Seventh Street Books, 2014). I don’t usually choose murder mysteries, but this one is on my daughter’s book club’s reading list. A college student, assigned to write a biography, chooses an elderly resident in a nursing home. He learns about a murder, a cover-up, and the past he and his subject try to keep secret from themselves. Recommended.
Be curious! (and embrace similarities
when and where you find them)
RSS Feed