Thinking and Making: Art and Craft in Library of Congress Classification

Authors

Rochelle Smith, University of IdahoFollow

Abstract

Why are art and craft so widely separated in the Library of Congress Classification (LC) System? All classification systems give insight into worldviews prevalent at the time they were created, and library systems are especially illustrative of the cultures and cultural moments which shaped them. The separation of art and craft in LC, in N and TT respectively, compared to their collocation in LC’s contemporaries, Dewey Decimal Classification and Cutter’s Expansive Classification, suggests divergent views of the arts within librarianship, illuminating American views on the relative definitions of art and craft from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.