There are certain things that I suppose I take for granted. That my vocabulary might be irregular, for example, or that it is somehow racialized, localized, or privileged. Given the pride Wisconsinites take in their easy-to-understand dialect peppered with impenetrable slang (have a drink from the bubbler-ed.) this perhaps shouldn't be surprising, but still, it is.
Systems work the same way, and I feel a bit foolish now and then when I sit in my favorite chair and it suddenly occurs to me that as surely as someone built this chair, someone designed the systems by which we organize information and libraries, and in doing so left the personal fingerprints (vocabularyprints?) in the systems they crafted. The symbols they chose have meaning to people like them.
Contrariwise or perhaps speaking as someone of like mind (if not like type), I rather like the arbitrary system. Taxonomies start somewhere, and they are always arbitrary. The bias inherent in the system is regrettable and it is changing, but in the past from which Dewey and Cutter are writing, being able to serve a hundred people at the expense of one strikes me as a fair trade in the absence of a system that can account for the peculiarities of the one.
Of course, this stems from my own organization practices: break things down into broad categories, then specialize. Perhaps I am simply coming at this the wrong way, since I can't figure out why "women" being promoted as the top of the hierarchy over "wimmin" is bad. Even if it is bad, the machines are getting smarter, and pretty soon that degree of arbitrary hierarchy won't be necessary.
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