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Introduction
The neat division of knowledge into tidy silos of scholarly disciplines, each with its own section of a knowledge organization system (KOS), has long characterized the efforts of libraries to arrange their collections of books. The KOS most commonly used in American academic libraries is the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). LCC, developed between 1899 and 1903 by James C. M. Hanson and Charles Martel, is based on the work of Charles Ammi Cutter. Cutter devised his “Expansive Classification” to embody the universe of human knowledge within twenty-seven classes, while Hanson and Martel eventually settled on twenty (Chan 1999, 6–12). Those classes tend to mirror the names of academic departments then prevailing in colleges and universities (e.g., Philosophy, History, Medicine, and Agriculture). As Drabinski (2013) notes, “libraries are sites constructed by the disciplinary power of language” (94).
While it is theoretically possible to imagine a KOS that would use an organizing heuristic other than scholarly discipline (e.g., a topical approach), the fact remains that libraries have been using LCC for so long that “researchers are now used to finding documents grouped by discipline” (Szostak, Gnoli, and López-Huertas 2016, 96). LCC is in place, and the use of shared catalog records means that most libraries are likely to continue its use. For over a century, the Library of Congress (LC) has produced catalog records that are reused by other libraries, and the availability of LC records has created a strong incentive for libraries to adopt LCC for ease of processing new acquisitions (Edlund 1976; Yee 2009.) As Denda (2005) observes, “this cataloging is often acquired and reused with minimal revision or no revision” (268). Access to monographs in fields such as LGBTQIA and African American studies can be greatly affected by the disciplinary model of LCC, which separates, for example, history from politics, and photography from art.
Classification, of course, is only one aspect of the KOS employed by libraries using LCC. It is intended to be complemented by Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). While a classification system requires a book to be shelved in a single location, subject headings allow multiple points of topical access to the same work, as Pettee (1946, 48) explains:
The parallel lines of our classification schemes are drawn...