Look, I know there’s a lot going at the moment in the world, but I did want to share a short post about a bit of Canadian library history that’s not well understood outside of law libraries.
In my last post, I wrote about recent changes made by the Library of Congress to the LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings) that non-American English-speaking countries are reluctant to accept.
Today, I want to talk about a similar situation from 1968 when five librarians decided that their Canadian Libraries would not follow Library of Congress Classification schedule for Law.
In the late 1960s the legal publishing industry was maturing and the number of new publications was growing significantly. Collections in Canadian law libraries were quickly outgrowing the local systems they had in place to organize their collections and a formal classification scheme began to look more and more appealing.
A small group of academic law librarians, led by Shih-Sheng Hu, from the University of Manitoba Law Library, met in the summer of 1968 to discuss their options. The others present were Roger Jacobs (University of Windsor Law Library), Balfour Halevy, Diana Priestly and Judy Ginsberg (all from the York University Law Library). For years there had been a good deal of discussion in the professional literature weighing the merits of classifying legal collections. This group, eager to bring greater control to their growing collections, were clearly in favour of classification and decided to take a look at the recently prepared draft of the Library of Congress’s KF Classification for American federal law.
KF Modified Origins: The Group of 5, The KF Modified Blog, 13Oct 2009
Here’s the tldr, paraphrased largely from “KF Classification Modified For Use in Canadian Libraries” [PDF] by Judith “Judy” Ginsberg.
Up until the late 1960s, many law libraries in North America were not organized with a formal and shared classification scheme. Works were arranged alphabetically within broad subject areas (like, Torts or Contracts), or in ways that made sense locally. At this time, even the Library of Congress did not have fully developed a class for Law.
Further, while the Library of Congress Classification scheme was largely in place by 1939, Class K for Law was the last class of the LCC to be developed and not introduced until much later. Because the Library of Congress maintains a separate Law Library which utilized the traditional organization of law libraries by form, a subject-oriented classification for law was not deemed necessary. Hence, the development of class K was developed piecemeal and as somewhat of an expediency.
“The KF Modification: A Canadian Approach to Organizing and Understanding Law” by Louis Mirando, Slaw, November 29, 2016.
But then legal publishing and library collections began to sharply increase in volume and rate, and local systems longer felt sufficient. In the late 1960s, the Library of Congress started the process of developing the K schedule for Law. In doing so, the Library of Congress decided to classify law documents by jurisdiction, starting with the United States.
There are several reasons that the Library of Congress may have used this jurisdictional bias in classifying and organizing its law collections. The LCC has often been criticized as being enumerative rather than epistemological; that is, it was not initially conceived as a scheme to classify all the world’s knowledge but was developed at a practical level to organize and describe the holdings of one library.
“The KF Modification: A Canadian Approach to Organizing and Understanding Law” by Louis Mirando, Slaw, November 29, 2016.
There were few other systems available for Law at the time. There was Moys, (still in use at the BC Courthouse Library, among others), the Los Angeles County’s classification for Law (adopted by Queen’s University), and the Library of Parliament’s system. But what the Group of Five decided was they would take the existing schedule of KF Classification for U.S. Federal Law and modify it so could fit the law of all common law jurisdictions. Rather than split the collection by jurisdiction, materials would be grouped by subject. “For example, a general treatise on United States Family Law and one on Canadian Family Law would both be classified in KF 505”.
That work would be known as KF Modified.
The Library of Congress developed the KE Schedule for Canadian Law in 1976. Windsor’s Law Library still uses KF modified. We don’t have a single print work shelved under KE. But the University of Windsor’s other library, does:
KF Modified does make the matter of having shelf-ready materials a little more complicated, since only a relatively small number of Canadian Libraries use KF Modified.
I will end this post with the words of York Librarian, F. Tim Knight who did much of the work modifying KF modified as necessary, through the years. From KF Modified and the Classification of Canadian Common Law:
We know classification serves an important function. Classification brings like things together and provides some intellectual clarity to subject areas where it is applied. But classification systems, by their very nature, are inherently flawed. Creating a classification system involves choosing the ‘top terms’ that will serve as the first level in the classification hierarchy. Additional terms will be found lower down in the hierarchy and will be related but considered secondary or subordinate to the top terms. When classifying legal resources, for example, two likely entry points are the legal jurisdiction or the legal topic. Either approach is a valid one. Neither is inherently wrong or right, inferior or superior: they are merely two different ways to solve the same organizational problem…
In an entirely digital environment, where documents are no longer pinned to their physical manifestations on library shelves, it is becoming easier to imagine ourselves working in systems where researchers can choose the top terms in a classification scheme for themselves.