Dallas Public Library: Dewey Have Vinyl? Dewey Ever!

Press release from Dallas Public Library:

June 30, 2021

Roughly two years ago—and one of those years was certainly rougher than the other—I wrote about our purchase of some 40 new vinyl records, but with studied avoidance of words like “browse.” At the time, we were trying like mad to make the collection available, accessible, attractive, and many other things beginning with “A,” but we still hadn’t arranged them on the 4th floor of the Central Library so that you could find a specific album or artist with dependable ease. Now, however, dependable ease has arrived—or at least it’s within reach.

The vinyl collection’s new layout navigates the musical landscape by having its Dewey Decimal cake and eating it, too. This trick we accomplish by dividing all of music into three categories: Pop, Jazz, and Everything else.

Democracy at Work

Those first two—pop music and jazz—are each arranged in alphabetical order by artist. Thus, if you stop by Central’s 4th floor thinking “I feel like listening to something by The Residents today,” you have a pretty good chance of finding their albums if you land in the Pop section and get your alphabetical bearings.

And there they are, precisely where they should be: between REO Speedwagon and Restless Heart. The Beach Boys are one aisle over, just before the Beatles. But where’s The Velvet Underground? Right where you’d expect, with Bobby Vee on one side, and Billy Vera and the Beaters on the other.

As you can see, this alphabetical ordering makes for an almost aggressively democratic collocation of artists: Daft Punk separates The Cyrkle from Vernon Dalhart; Yma Sumac resides between Donna Summer and Moses Sumney; Led Zeppelin shows up after Lazy Lester and before Brenda Lee; and Sonic Youth sits on the same shelf as Sonny and Cher and The Sons of the Pioneers.

Blowing the Lid Off the Cutter Number (Or Perhaps Vice Versa)

Our assignment of call numbers—important here, as elsewhere in the library—includes an entry between the Dewey number and the year of publication called a Cutter number, the real key to finding stuff in the pop and jazz sections. Not content to leave my explanation at that, though, I decided to grill the experts in the Dallas Public Library’s Cataloging department to clear up what Cutter numbers are and what they do. A couple of weeks ago, in a hard-hitting interview with DPL cataloger Kate Meador, I asked some tough questions to get to the real reasons behind these codes (and “BS” stands for Booked Solid, not Baking Soda):

BS Andrew: We have these Dewey numbers to help us find things more easily. So, what’s all the stuff after the Dewey number?

Cataloging Kate: The second part—the letter of the alphabet followed by a series of one to three numbers—is called a Cutter number. It’s helpful for locating an item in the library more precisely than you could if you just had the Dewey number.

BS Andrew: So, here’s an example, the album Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. It’s clearly popular music—the National Recording Registry settled that years ago—but why does the second part, the—Cutter number, is it?—begin with P instead of with F? I thought we always filed things by the author’s last name.

Cataloging Kate: When the author is a group, we assign it a Cutter number based on the first letter of the name of the group. Besides, “Floyd” isn’t the band’s last name.

BS Andrew: I see—otherwise they’d be “Floyd comma Pink.” So, what are the numbers and stuff after the P? On this album, we’ve got “P655D.”

Cataloging Kate: The P, as we settled in our previous debate, is the first letter of our group author’s name; the 655 is a number we get from a list—called a Cutter-Sanborn table—that assures consistency of numbering throughout the library. In that table, “Pink” gets a 655 after the P.

BS Andrew: So, what’s the D that follows the 655 for?

Cataloging Kate: Do you always start questions with “So…”?

BS Andrew: I certainly do. So, who is interviewing who here?

Cataloging Kate: You mean Who is interviewing whom here, don’t you? I’ll ask the questions from now on, starting with this: doesn’t it make sense that the D, the first letter of the album’s title, would help locate things even more precisely?

BS Andrew: Yes, it does, and I see you are now both asking and answering the questions.

Cataloging Kate: I think that’s a better way of conducting this hard-hitting interview. Besides, I hit harder than you do.

BS Andrew: Thank you, Kate, for taking time out of your day to answer my tough questions. This has been the most humiliating interview I’ve ever conducted.

Cataloging Kate: That’s your own fault, and you’re quite welcome.

Picking up on Kate’s explanation, if you have doubts about where a certain artist or recording is located, this not-so-secret code on each item—the Cutter number—clears things up. Take, for example, that dangerously crowded “Taylor” shelf: there’s Eddie, James, Koko, Tut, and Livingston; are they just all in there together, in no particular order?

Please. This is a library. Koko Taylor is first: her Cutter number is T238 (her first name is Cora).

Then comes Eddie—his Cutter is T239. James, Livingston and the all-important Tut Taylor are T243, T243, and T246, respectively. Furthermore, since the Cutter number usually includes the first letter or two of the album’s title after the 3-digit number, there’s plenty of help, especially in locating, say, Gorilla among all those James Taylor albums: its Cutter number is T243G, since G is the first letter of the title, and it sits on the shelf between Dad Loves His Work (T243D) and James Taylor (T243JA). The catalog will tell you if an album is on hand, and it also provides these codes for helping you find them with—here’s that phrase again—dependable ease (if they are out of order on the shelf, do I need to tell you whom to blame?)

Sometimes, you’ll find one artist in two places, but we’ve tried to avoid that, as much as possible.

Thus Bob Dylan’s older albums (made when he was primarily regarded as a folk artist: think John Wesley Harding or Blonde on Blonde), carry the call number 784.4, while albums dating from his days of staggering international success, like Infidels or Empire Burlesque, get numbers like 784.742. All of these albums, however, are now together in the pop section, united by the Cutter number, D996.

That’s how we have organized the Jazz and Pop. What about that “Everything Else” section?
Crowded, Sprawling, Diverse…and Orderly

It’s in strict Dewey Decimal order, just like the rest of the library. The signs on the end of the shelves will give you some idea of what to expect, but if you look something up in the catalog or ask a librarian’s help—and never hesitate to do so—you should come away with a Dewey number, Cutter number and all, that will launch you down the aisle where the album is located.

The section begins with general stuff, like anthologies and collections. Here you’ll find New World Records’ Recorded Anthology of American Music, a sprawling collection of recordings that includes Sissle & Blake’s Shuffle Along: An Archival Re-creation of the 1921 Production, Featuring Members of the Original Cast; also Old Mother Hippletoe: Rural and Urban Children’s Songs; and Songs of Love, Luck, Animals, and Magic: Music of the Yurok and Tolowa Indians. Those all have call numbers beginning with 780 (780.815, to be precise). Following that, we have opera recordings (782.1), stage and screen soundtracks (782.6-8) and ballet music (782.9).

I’ll dispense with taking you the rest of the way, from 783 to 789 and beyond. Everything from gospel to world music and classical is in there (including music for player piano). Nevertheless, remember that something that strikes you as popular music probably is, so it likely won’t be in this section. That doesn’t mean we regard the “everything elses” as unpopular—just that the albums contained there are so all-over-the-place that it’s easier to find something using the Dewey number and the Cutter number that follows it.

“Wait,” you protest, “what happened to the 781s?” I see that our system won’t get away with any careless classification while you’re around. All right, Eagle Eyes, chew on this: the Pop and Jazz areas account for most of those numbers, so—since those genres are dealt with alphabetically by author (and more precisely by Cutter number) in their respective sections—the numbers skip from 780 to 782. It’s the kind of situation I was referring to above when I brought up Bob Dylan, and how we’ve put his stuff all in one place.

Remember, when we’re talking about the universe of Everything Else, a skip in the numbers is always in the interest of—all together now—dependable ease. If the number you’re after doesn’t show up where it looks like it ought to, just come to the librarians with your hard-hitting questions. They’re trained never to hit back.

This press release was produced by Dallas Public Library. The views expressed here are the author’s own.