Ralph Parker:
But there were members of the Library committee who were dissatisfied with the, uh, classification and the cataloging as it had existed. The Dewey classification here had been doctored...

Patricia Timberlake:
Yeah.

Parker:
...considerably. And in 1959, the 16th edition of Dewey had come out, and we were considering what we should do. Now the, we were presumably following the 14th edition. Now 15th edition was that abortive edition that nobody ever used. And, uh, we did a, an analysis of the number of books that were being cataloged, at the time being received, that received, that were being classified according to Dewey as published in the 14th edition. And we found that the changes represented 20 percent of all books. Now these changes, some of which had been initiated as early as 1918, for instance, entire agriculture had been entirely changed. Uh, the literature sections had been changed even earlier. Engineering section had been extensively changed. Now these changes were such that as revisions came out in the system, they could not be utilized. So we were classifying by, uh, old, outdated, the schedules, and about 20 percent of the books that were coming in. Now there were extensive changes made between the 14th and the 16th, and we estimated that if we were to change to the 16th edition of Dewey, we would be one fourth of all the books, that is not 20 percent but 25 percent, would be in classifications that were not 16th edition. Uh, to undertake then any kind of a reclassification of Dewey would create an enormous confusion because, uh, uh, numbers had been reassigned, uh, locally used, the local use numbers, that had no compatibility with the old numbers. So if, for example, you changed 634 to whatever 634 should be in the 16th edition, you would be mixing books in with maybe the 633s to 635s or some other number. So you had old and new mixed, and there was no, no way of doing it without having, uh, confusion during the period, the entire period, of reclassification. Uh, so, uh, uh, we, uh, explored the idea of Library of Congress classification.