ABSTRACT
Henry Evelyn Bliss devoted a large part of his life to the study of classification and his thoughts and ideas are expounded in a number of articles and books beginning in 1910 and culminating in 1953 with the publication of his Bibliographic Classification. A Bliss Classification Association was formed in the United Kingdom 1967 and it was suggested that a new and completely revised edition of the full BC should be made available. ‘However, the revision has been so radical that it is more accurately described as a completely new system, using only the broad outline developed by Bliss’.7 One of the main features of the original scheme was the carefully designed main class order.This order in fact reflects the considerable attention that Bliss gave to the development of this part of his scheme, in an attempt to make it adhere to what he called ‘the scientific and educational consensus’, the way in which ‘the majority of subject specialists expect their work to be organized’ (Maltby, p. 208). The Association began to publish this much-improved, revised version of the original Bliss scheme in 1977 – the Bliss Bibliographic Classification (Second Edition) or BC2. It is based on the principles of faceted classification and some 15 of approximately 28 volumes of schedules have so far been published. The latest was Class W, The Arts, published in 2007 (Mills). The schedules are constantly updated and amendments are published in the Bliss Classification annual Bulletin. In the original enumerative scheme, many subjects are not listed and therefore cannot be classified. The revised scheme is fully faceted and synthetic and therefore allows for much greater detail. Any class may be qualified by all the classes following it in citation order (and therefore filing before it). This may be illustrated by the following example taken from class Q ‘Social welfare’ (1977). Q Social welfare QEL Residential care QLV Old people After analysing the subject, classification is achieved by arranging the elements in the reverse order of the BC2 schedule going from the most specific to the most general. The classmark is then formed by combining
the elements but the repeated initial class letter is dropped from all but the first component. Therefore: Residential care for the elderly = QLV EL The ‘Q’ from ‘QEL’ is dropped in the final classmark. Here is a further example of the detail that BC2 provides. KMU R Rural communities . . . KOM Unemployed persons . . . KVQ E Indian society Therefore: Unemployment in rural communities in India = KVQ EOM MUR The initial ‘K’ is dropped from ‘KOM’ and ‘KMU R’ before combining the elements. The notation is primarily alphabetical, although some use is made of the digits 1-9, and purely ordinal (see page 82). A space is inserted after every three letters for clarity and as an aid to understanding. Detailed alphabetical indexes to each class are provided. These are created using the terms in the schedules but chain procedure (see pages 115-6) is used in order to bring together scattered items. Where the examples ‘Residential care for the elderly’ and ‘Unemployment in rural communities in India’ cited above are concerned, the index entries would be: Old people : Residential care : Social welfare QLV EL Rural communities : Unemployment : Indian society KVQ EOM MUR Although the scheme is ‘designed to give the most helpful and logical order’, ‘BC2 recognises that the rigid application of its citation order may not best suit the needs of readers in all contexts’.8 The new Bliss is an ambitious project ‘using and developing the work of the Classification Research Group towards the elusive goal of a completely new general classification scheme’ (Rowley, 2000). Although it has its adherents, particularly in education libraries (Foskett, 2000), it is not widely used. Foskett asserts, that because of finance and other factors, its future seems less assured than UDC (ibid.).
