Brian Deer Classification System

Classification: From Aristotle to Brian Deer

Underlying the Brian Deer system is a critique of library classification, though Deer himself never committed one to writing. Others have been left to do this -- to argue that First Nations ways of perceiving the world do not fit the pigeonholes of classifications created by a different culture. There is a vibrant body of library discussion and literature on the thesis that classification is culture-bound. A study of an alternative classification system such as that of Brian Deer inevitably leads to exploring this thesis, which leads to examining some fundamental aspects of classification theory.

Until the mid-20th century, there was very little controversy in classification theory, and particularly not in North America. As Arlene Taylor points out, classification theory never received as much attention here as it did in Europe.[12]

For decades after their creation in the late 1800s, the two major classification schemes used in the Anglo-American world -- Dewey and Library of Congress -- were assumed to rest on firm theoretical foundations. They depended upon the Aristotelian theory of categories, and these theoretical underpinnings were not seriously questioned.[13]

The challenge to the classical theory of categories began to appear, according to Taylor, in 1953, when Ludwig Wittgenstein showed that all categories do not fit the classical mould. Categories, he demonstrated, have no single collection of common properties, and have no fixed boundaries.[14]

In 1965, Lotfi Zadeh further questioned the classical theory of categories, introducing his fuzzy set theory, and arguing that some categories are subjective, depend upon the observer, and are not well-defined. In the 1970s. Eleanor Rosch put forth the idea of the human and "ad hoc" character of categorization.[15]

If the dominant library classification systems existed for many decades without coming under theoretical attack, this is not to say cataloguers ever had an easy time of it. To put it one way, "fuzziness" and the subjectivity of the human experience was inherent in the classical theory -- and therefore in Dewey and LC - and practicing librarians always knew it.

As Taylor writes: "Because the most widely used classification schemes in the United States are based upon the classical theory of categories, classifiers using them are sometimes quite frustrated to find that they have a subject concept that does not fit neatly into one of the categories." They are often relieved to learn, says Taylor, that classical theory has major cracks and fuzzy sets.[16]

By 1971, North American attitudes toward classification were changing on all fronts. In that year, A. C. Foskett wrote that a classification scheme cannot be objective; it reflects "both the prejudices of its time and those of its author."[17]

Arguably, this emerging school of thought was itself a product of its time. In western societies, a cultural divide occurred, which can be pinpointed at or near the 1960s. In that era of cultural, social and political ferment, a wide range of ethnic, linguistic, national and cultural groups emerged to assert their identity. Early in the 1960s, the renowned British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper could pronounce: "African history is irrelevant."[18] In this, he reinforced the views of an earlier scholar, Professor A.P. Newton, who wrote: "the Africa that lies beyond the Tropic of Cancer has a story that begins only with modern times."[19]

But a decade later these views, certainly in the academic community, were untenable. A huge change had taken place in the social-cultural milieu. In the United States, many attributed the change to the civil rights movement. In a 1971 article, "The Treatment of the American Indian in the Library of Congress E-F Schedule," Thomas Yen-Ran Yeh wrote that the 1960s had altered forever that nation's attitude toward minorities. "A library classification," he wrote, needs constant revision to absorb current thought."[20]

Today, scholars like Hope Olson of the University of Alberta appear to be carrying out a radical extension of A.C. Foskett's thesis that library classification is a social construction. According to Olson, it is only by a more profound investigation of the complexities of classification that its biases can be ameliorated.

Classification, says Olson, is the act of placing related concepts in proximity to each other. In so doing, it "must distort all knowledge in its infinite multidimensionality into a linear arrangement suitable for creating a browsable list or locations on shelves."[21] In its use for shelving books in a library, Olson writes, "a book on a shelf can be to the left of one book and to the right of another but cannot sit next to a third."[22] When classification gathers works on topic or group of topics and places them in close proximity to related topics, new perceptions, new meanings and new knowledge, in effect, are created.[23]

When Olson writes: "the network creates the meaning," she indicates that classification is not separate from or "other" than meaning or knowledge. Classification creates meaning and knowledge.

As Olson puts it: "The representation of information, through classification, is part of the construction of information. Classification remakes and alters information by constructing a particular context for it -- gathering, scattering, and juxtaposing topics in relation to each other. How broadly or narrowly topics are represented will enhance or mask their visibility. In these ways, classification produces information in a creative process."[24]

For Olson and others, classification is developed by the most powerful discourse, or the mainstream, of a society. Some classes of people and some knowledge, is always left on the periphery. Classification, she says, might be seen "as a dense mainstream core of aptly juxtaposed concepts with marginal concepts scattered around the edges or not represented at all."[25] Classification not only constructs what is "knowable," it also determines "whose voices are heard."[26]

In this website study, which focuses on First Nations and classification, Olson's views on bias serve as a backdrop and a context. We wished to understand the Brian Deer system, and the motivation behind its creation. It seems clear that Deer concluded, as Hope Olson puts it, that classification always gathers, juxtaposes and scatters knowledge, and that in the case of First Nations, traditional classification systems do this in a way that is detrimental to First Nations collections and access to them.

To Deer, and to librarians in the field with whom we spoke, First Nations knowledge is made peripheral and marginal (in Olson's terms) by both Library of Congress and Dewey. Olson's theory indicates that classification is biased, by definition. This raises the issue of whether peoples or bodies of knowledge which are marginalized must create their own classification systems to serve their own needs. In library practice, these might be the choices: maintain the status quo, initiate moderate adaptation, or strike out in new directions, as Brian Deer did, to create new systems of classification that will recognize and validate a culture's alternate view of the world.

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