It’s not illegal, but it’s not nice

By Mark Field

It is unlikely that I will be invited to write this column again, or indeed, any column. As we get older, we get odder, and I am getting very odd. I know that wanting to talk about classification schemes is seen as slightly worrying: I recall an episode in Manchester in the UK following copious amounts of Guinness discovering that I had a need to explain Dewey to a charming young person. It’s not illegal, but it’s not nice. And yet I feel the need to launch off on the Universal Decimal Classification.

The problem arises from having a copy of Universal Decimal Classification in the downstairs toilet. My place of reflection does contain many works of merit, and the UDC Pocket Edition is one I often reach for. Some readers of Enterprise Information will be aware that UDC, the classification scheme, is the intellectual residue of an incredible enterprise: a catalogue of all human knowledge. Two Belgians, Paul Otlet and Henry LaFontaine, derived a scheme based on the Dewey Decimal Classification to provide useful subject access to their Universal Index, which listed journal articles, newspaper pieces and almost any kind of document of interest to the late 19th century Francophone mind.

The crazy thing is, we took the first faltering steps towards the actual achievement of the Universal Index pretty much as soon as the web first appeared. It was the first thought of many early adopters of the web (for me, that means people who had used the web for at least two years before Explorer) that the free universal catalogue was achieved.

Didn’t happen though. A huge pile of laughable drool very quickly found a doorway in to our computers, with a teensy weensy bit of good writing here and there: for every essay of the significance of ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, there were six million on Area 51 and Black Helicopters. And we all know why. Crap is free, good stuff costs. And the web is not in any sense a repository of content in its own right – it is an over-developed publication technology, it is the most recent means for owners of content of value to sell content of value to the content customer.

Of course, it’s not that cut and dried. For every Questia (The World’s Largest Online Library: $14.99 a month) there’s a Blue Web’n (a free online library of 1942 education sites categorised by subject, grade level and format), but the stuff we really need costs. Which is sort of OK, but providers of content are trying to get their customers to pay for the costs of shifting from hard copy to electronic copy by making subscription to e-copy contingent upon subscription to hard copy, and (guess what?) make us pay for both.

Given that year on year M&A activity results in a smaller number of larger content owners, they will probably get away with this, but it’s dumb anyway.

The other dumb thing is not collaborating on a consistent universal standard for describing their content so we can navigate the damn stuff. Web-Belgians. That’s what we need.