Origins of The System
Bliss was born in New York in 1870 and in 1891 began work in the library of the College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York).
Bliss had a lifelong interest in the organization, structure and philosophy of knowledge and was very critical of the library classification systems that were available to him. He believed that because the popular Library of Congress system had been designed for a specific library (the Library of Congress) it had no use as a standard system outside that library. He also greatly disliked the Dewey Decimal system.
Bliss wanted a classification system that would provide distinct rules yet still be adaptable to whatever kind of collection a library might have, as different libraries have different needs. His solution was the concept of “alternative location,” in which a particular subject could be put in more than one place, as long as the library made a specific choice and used it consistently.
In 1908 Bliss reclassified 60,000 of his library’s books, and in 1910 he published an article with a rough scheme of his general ideas. But as he continued to develop his system he realized that it was going to be a much larger project than he had anticipated. The first of his four volumes appeared in 1940 (the year he retired) and the last in 1953, two years before his death.
Some of the underlying policies of the BC system were:
- alternative location
- brief, concise notation
- organizing knowledge according to academic expertise
- subjects moving gradually from topic to topic as they naturally related to one another.
Read more about this topic: Bliss Bibliographic Classification
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