Forty Years of Classification Online: Final Chapter or Future Unlimited?

This paper examines the forty-year history of online use of classification systems. Enhancing subject access was the rationale forobtaining support to conduct research in classification online and for incorporating classification into online systems. Catalogers have been the beneficiaries of most of the advances in classification online and operational online systems are now able to assist them in class number assignment and shelflisting. To this day, the only way in which most end users experience classification online is through their online catalog’s shelflist browsing capability. The author speculates on the reasons why classification online never caught on as an end user’s tool in online systems. Both the information industry and the library and information science community missed the opportunity to lead the charge in the organization of Internet resources; however, OCLC, the publisher of the Dewey Decimal Classification, has made substantial improvements to the scheme that have increased its versatility for organizing Internet resources. Because mass digitization projects such as Google Print will solve the problem of subject access, the author makes recommendations for classification online to solve these vexing problems of end users: staging of access, retrieving the best material in response to user queries, and automatic approaches to finding additional relevant information for an ongoing search