The Australia and New Zealand Theological Library Association conducts a Virtual Conference in September 2020. In keeping with convention, there is a Pre-Conference Cataloguing Workshop. The Workshop runs uninterrupted for a fortnight on the Association’s e-list, from Thursday the 27th of August to the first morning of the ANZTLA Virtual Conference on Thursday the 10th of September. On Day Four we looked at the Union Classification (Pettee). Here are my opening words to the online discussion.
Julia Pettee (1872-1967) was the woman for the job. She responded to the need for a proper classification of the library of Union Theological Seminary in New York by devising an informed and specialist scheme for any theology library. The first edition was published in 1924. Its similarity to LC Classification, also a two-letter and number system, is no accident. Pettee took time off during the creation of the Union system to work at the Library of Congress on its emerging classification scheme, more particularly on Religion. Her wiki declares her immortal words that should be carved in stone at the library door: ‘Throughout her career, she emphasized that "there is no infallible substitute for the good judgement of the cataloger".
‘Julia Pettee, librarian : the life
and work of Julia Pettee (1872-1967)’, by Lennart Pearson, published in 2011,
is a valuable addition to your collection. Elizabeth Call wrote an admiring brief history entitled ‘Organizing
the Divine’ in 2016:
Union Classification, commonly referred to simply as Pettee,
is a product of its time, but then much of what goes on in theology is
timeless. Its great strengths are its sophisticated tables for Bible,
Patristics, Medieval and Modern Theologians, Systematic Theology, Church
History, and Liturgy. She did a sizable job of arranging the literature of the major
world religions into some order, given the spread of knowledge about those literatures
available at the time in the United States. Obviously too, if what you are
classifying is a vast library of mainly Christian literature, then that’s where
you start. You start with what you have, not with what is hypothetical. Union
Classification continues to operate effectively in many theological libraries
worldwide, including a fair number in our part of the world.
Pettee has no web presence. This is because no formal international
editorial authority has operated since the 1980s. There is no website dedicated
to updates. The implosion happened in the United States at that time, when
college decision-makers were persuaded of the long-term advantages of switching
to LC Classification. The advent of automation prompted many to believe that LC
would become the universal system for classification, a casual belief taken up
more dogmatically by library boards than librarians. Conversion away from
Pettee ensued rapidly in North America, while Australia was insulated from the
changes abroad. Pettee is a nice thought in New Zealand.
In the absence of an international authority, the cataloguers
who maintained some management of Pettee at Union Presbyterian Seminary in
Richmond, Virginia graciously approved ANZTLA’s request to workshop new subject
numbers at annual conferences. At these workshops, which continued into the new
millennium and were light-heartedly known as Pettee Sessions, ANZTLA
cataloguers tabled expansions to their own manuals, discussed the whys and
where-puts of new subjects in the field, and generally arrived at agreed
changes which were then adopted by all users of the scheme.
Conversion from Pettee in Australia has not been a high
priority. This seems to be the case with the larger theological libraries, due as
much as anything to the time and costs involved in such a massive undertaking,
and for what? The reality about Pettee is quite simply that it is a tailor-made
theological classification system, ideal for handling the categories of
knowledge that are the stock of Theology. It is the only specialist theology
classification of its kind. Where the Dewey 200s (Religion) are spread across ten
main subjects, Pettee has 26. It is user-friendly and infinitely more capable
of updates than either Dewey or LC.
Union Classification librarians in ANZTLA are invited to make
remarks about their current use of the system here in the workshop. I also encourage
conversation between Pettee-users, who share a creative and original heritage,
both here and outside of ANZTLA conference time.
Philip Harvey
Workshop Facilitator
No comments:
Post a Comment