Really long Dewey numbers

When cataloguing a book today (Awakening lives : autobiographies of Jewish youth in Poland before the Holocaust / edited by Jeffrey Shandler) I noticed that the CIP gave the Dewey number as 920.00929950332880835. I remember some long ones from university when I did an essay on medieval marriage,
though I’m sure they weren’t this long. I tried a search on Google to see if I could find any ridiculously long ones. The Madison Public Library gave 301.1543012917492705694 for a book (Arab attitudes towards Israel / by Yehoshafat Harkabi) classified by the Northwestern University Library (Chicago, I believe). This is indeed three digits longer than the one I found at 22 digits (although Madison claim 23, which is correct if they’re counting the decimal point). One digit longer, in fact, is 338.76178991245500977434, given to a book (The Motown story / Don Waller) by the Library of Congress with 23 digits. There must be longer ones somewhere…

4 thoughts on “Really long Dewey numbers”

Gordon Bennett. Does data really need classifying that specifically?

Not really, and I can’t imagine trying to put the spine label on those books. It’s as much a symptom of the inadequacy of Dewey’s reliance on the decimal system and its attempts to catch up with more (arguably) more effective schemes. Note that they are all social science books really, something that gets written about a lot now but Mr Dewey probably wasn’t too concerned with. I don’t know too much about Dewey and I haven’t checked, but I would imagine the computer science numbers are heading for a similar pickle.

longest term we have is INTERNET (ACCESS TO) = 621.381.95.008.03(100)INTERNET.008.222.1
We being the BBC TV Archive.

What scheme is that? It looks like a wierd form of UDC. We use a home-made scheme called Garside which uses whole subject names as prefixes, so it looks something like MEDICAL SCIENCES A 45 SMI. Some subject names are longer than others and can take indications of size, e.g. HISTORY OF SCIENCE QUARTOS F 55 JON. Luckily, it gets abbreviated on the spine.

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