Google vs. the Dewey Decimal System

The other day I found myself a bit confused by a question from a relative: "Do we even need the Dewey Decimal system anymore, now that we have Google?" Her question was mainly based on not knowing what Dewey Decimal is at all, but might it be a valid question?

Well, let's look at this. Google is, as I'm sure everyone who can read this knows, a search engine. If you're looking for, say, information on whether you get more wet by running or walking in the rain (this is an example given to me by the aforementioned questioner), you can use Google to find the answer, or at least potential answers on a variety of websites.

The Dewey Decimal Classification system, on the other hand (and along with its friend the Library of Congress Classification system, among others), is an organizational tool. It says that if you are looking for, say, an item about whether you get more wet by running or walking in the rain, you can find it on the shelf in probably the 530s (that's the lovely physics section) or so. But the trick is that sure, you can find books on physics in the 530s, but you might find the answer to this particular question somewhere else entirely. Like in the 613s in a book on health... I suppose you'd want the best way to avoid a cold, after all. You're really better off finding the book you want via the catalog (or Google, as I did here) and then heading for the shelf with decimal in hand.

So you cannot use Dewey directly to find an answer; that's what the books are for (which you can locate in your library using Dewey). You cannot use Google to find a book on a shelf (unless, of course, it gives you a call number), though you could use it to find a digitized book pretty quickly.

And that's another thing. Now that Google is digitizing books like a madsearchengine, I can see why Dewey and other classification schemes would be falling out of style. Who needs a call number for something intangible? But even with this mass move to the Web, libraries are still housing books that need to be organized. And even on the Web, people are interested in finding items that are related to the ones they are looking at now.

Why else would we have social bookmarking sites or an online encyclopedia that has at least a few good articles or even Google image search? Clearly, information wants to be organized (or at least we silly humans like it that way). Is there really a difference between using Dewey to sort books into categories like Technology and History and using tags to sort blog posts by the celebrities they mention?

No. Not really. So maybe Dewey and his decimals aren't going to prevail in the world of digitized books, where books can be "shelved" next to any other book that shares a tag (and really, that is a much nicer system to use!), conflicting topics be damned. But the concept behind Dewey, that of being able to sort and organize information, of being able to figure out which darn Google link is going to give you the answer you want... that's definitely going to stick around.