Exploring New Approaches to the Organization of Knowledge: The Subject Classification of James Duff Brown

James Duff Brown was an infl uential and energetic librarian in Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Subject Classifi - cation has characteristics that were unusual and idiosyncratic during his own time, but his work deserves recognition as one of the precursors of modern bibliographic classifi cation systems. This article discusses a number of theories and classifi cation practices that Brown developed. In particular, it investigates his views on the order of main classes, on the phenomenon of ???concrete??? subjects, and on the need for synthesized notations. It traces these ideas briefl y into the future through the work of S. R. Ranganathan, the Classifi cation Research Group, and the second edition of the Bliss Bibliographic Classifi cation system. It concludes that Brown???s work warrants further study for the light it may shed on current classifi cation theory and practice.published or submitted for publicatio