A Comparison of Cataloger and Non-Cataloger Responses to a Survey of Perceptions and Preference toward Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress Classification

Serving as a follow-up to Lund and Agbaji’s 2018 surveys of library employee preferences towards Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress Classification schemes, this study presents inferential comparisons between the responses of cataloging librarians’ and non-cataloging librarians perceptions and preferences towards DDC and LCC. The hypothesis for this research is that, based on the cataloger’s expertise in cataloging and classification relative to the average employee, they may have substantially different perceptions/preferences toward library classification schemes. The data, however, do not reflect such a difference. Instead, we find no statistically significant difference between the perceptions of catalogers and non-catalogers and only a small difference in preference exists, which can be explained by confounding variables. This suggests that although cataloging librarians have specialized knowledge about classification, their opinions about classification schemes are not distinct from their non-cataloging peers