Path: utzoo!attcan!ncrcan!becker!geac!jtsv16!uunet!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!xylogics!world!bzs
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Give it up, folks
Message-ID: <1989Nov17.173402.21820@world.std.com>
Date: 17 Nov 89 17:34:02 GMT
References: <36339@apple.Apple.COM> <10119@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> <36343@apple.Apple.COM> <1989Nov11.002535.21243@world.std.com> <255F14A9.16035@ateng.com> <1989Nov15.160912.8148@world.std.com> <3969@sbcs.sunysb.edu>
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Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
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From: brnstnd@stealth.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
>> The Library of Congress probably has
>> hundreds of thousands of subject classifications and I haven't heard
>> anyone calling the nation's library systems useless.
>
>Because most books are put into the right sections. In other words, the
>official subject divisions are easy to understand and widely respected.
>USENET groups don't work that way.

I bet you'd never get a librarian to agree to that statement. It's all
ultimately a fuzzy, humanist endeavor. Which is fine.

Cataloguing is a very difficult specialty, and worse, where something
seems to fit changes over time (not that it gets changed, but it can
seem very out of place twenty years later, where would you go to find
early books on cognitive modelling? Psychology? Neurobiology? Math?
Physiology? Philosophy? Computer Science????)
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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