ABSTRACT
A school library’s requirement will be similar to that of the public library but there may well be a need for the classification to reflect the curriculum, that is the way that subjects are taught. Teachers sometimes criticize certain schemes from this point of view, the Dewey Decimal Classification, for instance, which distributes the subject ‘Geography’ through various classes: 380, 550, 910, and so on. The school library may therefore prefer some other scheme that, in its opinion, more closely adheres to the needs of library users. However, the Library o f Congress Classification and the Dewey Decimal Classification are in widespread use in public libraries in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. A school library using one scheme and an adjacent public library using another is itself a situation which creates a further problem, namely a lack of standardization, which is hardly conducive to ease of use and customer satisfaction.
