Abstract

Even as the world of information moves increasingly away from print, academic librarians and patrons spend significant time in neighborhoods of books organized by Library of Congress Classification. Close attention to specific neighborhoods and historical inquiry into their organization opens windows into past and present constructions of knowledge. This essay examines one such neighborhood – the latter ranges of BF, and particularly its tail end, Occult Sciences. It explores the creation of this neighborhood in a deliberately recursive fashion, and the journey to determine how such content came to be collocated by the Library of Congress leads through other classification systems, bookseller catalogs, and even literature.

As food for further thought many comments from the essay manuscript’s anonymous reviewers are appended.

Disciplines

Library and Information Science

Number of Pages

29

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URL: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/lib_fac/108