Categorizing Knowledge, Danish Style

A friend of mine spent a semester in Denmark and had an interesting experience with the library there. Instead of finding the call numbers online and going to get the books herself (which, as we all know, usually leads to the discovery of any number of other books on the same topic nestled snuggly together on the shelf), she had to submit a request for each individual book she wanted to a staff member who went to get it for her. She couldn't go find the books herself, because they weren't arranged in any way that would help her find them. They were arranged by size.

I had a somewhat similar experience when I lived in Montreal, where the movie stores were almost as difficult to navigate as Danish libraries. The movies were arranged alphabetically, but not by title. According, I suppose, to the whim of the manager, they were ordered either alphabetically according to the last name of the star, director, or producer, so that Indiana Jones, for example, could very easily be shelved under "F", "S", or even "L".

Libraries, and other versions of information repositories are, at least in theory, organized in a way that maximizes user access, and their resources are categorized into different branches of human knowledge.

But I wonder how much information is never found because it has not been categorized in quite the way we think. Today we type in "keywords" to help us find what we are looking for but there are many different ways to categorize human knowledge and many different ways to label things. What one person may find to be the most significant, another may find to be completely irrelevant.

The internet is becoming one giant communal information repository. People can edit entries on Wikipedia and tag images and texts in the way that they feel is best. There is no standard for categorizing information. Even if there was, there is no real way for it to be definitive, which is reflected in the myriad classification schemes used by libraries around the world. Still, I do love traveling through the stacks to find the book that I was looking for and realizing that somehow, the one that I really need, while it didn't come up in my search, is sitting right there.

I guess I would have trouble in Denmark.