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May 10, 2007
New Edition of Class M
Good news! The new edition of Class M has just been published!! It looks like most of the schedule remains the same but there will be better geographical coverage for certain topics (especially Central and South America). The schedule is available now online through Catalogers Desktop, so we will begin use of it immediately.
Questions? Ask Mary
The official LC Cataloging Policy and Support Office press release:
NEW EDITION OF CLASS M
As of Thursday, May 10, 2007 a new edition of class M of the Library of Congress Classification has replaced the previous online version in Classification Web. The online version of LCC is the official edition, and all LC catalogers of classified materials are required to use it. A print version of the schedule will also be
published in summer 2007, but printed schedules are now regarded as a convenience for browsing, as they are never current. The online schedules are now updated overnight.
A new outline of class M has also been prepared. It is available on the CPSO home page .
The new outline will be included in the next cumulative print edition of LC Classification Outline (expected publication date not yet set).
The new edition of class M, which incorporates all changes made to the 1998 edition through May 1, 2007, is virtually the same structurally as the 1998 edition. So there are no major changes in where materials are classified, with one exception: geographic subclasses, which occur many places in subclass ML, which formerly provided poorly for certain regions and countries, notably Central and South America. Most of these sections have been reworked to provide the same kind of arrangement given most of the other areas of the world, first a class captioned General, and then a hierarchy, *By region or country, A-Z.* As a result, some classes where both general works and works devoted to particular regions and countries have until now been mixed together have, in the new edition, been overlaid with the separation between general works and an alphabetized arrangement of the rest, the standardized grouping. There has also been a slight revision of hierarchies in subclass ML for manuscripts and for works about sacred music by denomination.
Other features of the new edition are:
* Updated captions and better alignment of classes within major hierarchies
* Many more notes under individual classification numbers and spans of numbers explaining how they are to be used, and more references between classes
* Inclusion of hundreds of classification numbers not previously published. These include geographic breakdowns for secular vocal music and topics of songs in subclass M; types of dictionaries and geographic breakdowns for literature about music in subclass ML; and numbers for instructional techniques for instruments and specific playing techniques in subclass MT
* All known obsolete classes are included, a retrospective feature not previously provided in any schedule. Some obsolete numbers appear in the traditional way, as parenthesized numbers in the schedule
proper, but most are shown in a second range of tables (labeled MZ) in which obsolete class numbers are grouped by major hierarchy. References to the tables of obsolete numbers are provided at appropriate places in the schedule. By incorporating obsolete numbers, this edition of Class M is now effectively a cumulative history of this schedule since its first publication in 1904. As additional copies of annotated older editions of class M are discovered and deposited in CPSO, classification changes they record that have not yet been incorporated online will continue to be added, so that the retrospective aspect of the schedule can be further refined
* Information that formerly appeared in a separate "Glossary and General Guidelines" section is now incorporated into the schedule
* References to expansion tables (the first range of tables, labeled M) are now provided next to the caption of every class to which such a table applies. The span of decimal subdivisions a number occupies once the table is applied is now displayed as well. As a result, the problem of inadvertently assigning overlapping Cutter
numbers for adjacent classes should be eliminated
* Revised index incorporates more Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) vocabulary
Users of LCC have had access to the front matter of the printed editions in Catalogers Desktop. The new preface for class M has now been incorporated into the Desktop.
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