Review of the treatment of religion and religious works in the library of congress and Dewey decimal classification schemes for knowledge organization in libraries

Abstract

This work explored the treatment of major world religions in two major classification schemes, the Dewey Decimal Classification and the  Library of Congress Classification. Using literature and the aforementioned schemes’ latest editions, the work observed that both the  Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification Schemes have a huge bias towards Christianity, while Judaism, Islam,  Bahai faith, Zoroastrianism and other faiths are not given such extensive treatment. The situation, which leads to a lack of uniformity and  consistency in the placement of some religious works on the sparsely treated religions, is caused by the societal preferences and  demographics of the originators of the two major schemes considered in this work. While the work acknowledges that it is an innocuous  yet deliberate situation, the negative effects of such situations affect the organization and retrieval of information on the sparsely treated  religions in libraries that have adopted the aforementioned classification schemes. To address this imbalance, the work  recommends the intervention of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in providing standards for  subject cataloguing, and creation of an IFLA-owned universal classification scheme that should address the inherent biases of most  globally adopted classification schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification schemes.