The Library of Congress Classification Scheme and its Relationship to Dewey

It strikes me as an interesting circumstance that I have been given the opportunity to speak about the relationship between the Library of Congress classification (LCC) and the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) on November 11, a day which I will always think of as Armistice Day. There is no armistice for the respective advocates of these two great classification systems; or, if there is an armistice, there should not be one. The long-range implications of the issues surrounding the Dewey/LC debate are too crucial to pretend that differences of opinion over the merits of the two systems are trivial. LCC and DDC are very, very different. They are so different, and they are different in such ways, as to raise the most basic questions about the very purpose of general library classification, its structure, its uses, and its future in the United States. In a very real sense, these are competing systems. Decisions are made, human resources are allocated, and money is invested in one system or the other. This competition was neither asked for nor wanted by the Library of Congress nor the publishers of the Dewey system. But it does exist and has been a rather expensive proposition over the past ten to twenty years, if not longer.published or submitted for publicatio