#2xx

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

What is under 177.76 and 200.20?

177.76 is unassigned, but falls under 177.7 which is philanthropy

200.20 is religious miscellany

I think the spirit of the question can be found under 796.332 (american football) and 629.43 (unmanned spacecrafts/probes)

[marchistory]

258: If you liked it, then you should have put a stamp on it.

Field 258 - Philatelic Issue Data is possibly my favorite obscure MARC field.  It’s an entire field for recording information about stamps!  It has always felt delightfully specific and obscure - who actually makes MARC records for stamps?  Well, it turns out the answer is Canadian archivists.

According to the MARC format specification, 258 is defined as: “Issuing jurisdiction and denomination information about philatelic material, such as postage stamps, postal stationery (postal cards, etc., made available by a postal administration bearing a stamped impression (indicium) of denomination), revenue stamps (tax stamps), postage due stamps, and registered mail stamps. These are usually valid within a defined area and carry a value signifying prepayment or payment due for services or taxes.” It has two subfields defined: $a, Issuing jurisdiction (the governmental body that issued the material), and $b, Denomination (the monetary value of the item).

Not surprisingly, quirky little 258 is not a heavily used field. According to OCLC Research’s analysis of WorldCat data, it is used in only 19 records, which have a total of 400 holdings attached to them. (The holdings number jumped hugely from 18 in 2015 to 255 in 2016, and has been increasing ever since, which is probably an interesting story in its own right.)

Digging around in the proposals to the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress, I found the initial proposal for field 258 from 2003. The proposal was submitted by the National Archives of Canada, because Issue Data is considered an important part of archival description for philatelic records under the Rules for Archival Description (RAD), Canada’s archival description standard. And indeed, the structure and content of MARC field 258 is basically the same as RAD rule 12.3, since that it was it was based on.

Obviously, I wanted to read the RAD instructions for philatelic data [pdf], and thankfully the Canadian Council on Archives makes RAD freely available online. Hooray! I didn’t know that RAD (very unlike DACS) has chapters with distinct instructions for different material types. RAD is based on ISBD(G), and intended to be “compatible with” AACR2, so the chapter structure makes sense. And it explains why there are specific instructions for how to describes stamps and other postal materials.

It also turns out that RAD rules can be applied at any level of description - fonds, series, or individual item. I wonder if levels of description help explain the low number of occurrences in WorldCat. Philatelic issue data would seem to be more likely to be applied at series, folder, or item level description, and those are also the levels that are less likely to be shared in a shared bib environment like OCLC.

But this is also a big problem with our friend 258, right? The things that it seems like it would be useful for - hierarchical description, description of unique items - are not MARC’s strengths.  Even the National Archives of Canada seems to have figured that out. The 2004 proposal for field 258 mentions that it would be valuable for Archives Canada, a MARC-based cross-institution search for Canadian repositories. Archives Canada, though, is now an instance of Access to Memory, which does not use MARC. The National Archives of Canada does provide access to philatelic materials through its catalog, including at item and file/folder levels - for example, here and here. I can’t tell for sure, but it doesn’t seem likely that that system is based on MARC, either.

The 258 field serves a need for these specialized materials, but it’s obviously very limited in application and came out of a very specific use-case that the people who proposed it seem to have moved away from. I know that some institutions do use it (I’ve seen it in records in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s catalog, for example), but it’s pretty rare. Poor lil’ 258 doesn’t seem to be likely to get used much more any time soon.

I guess the 258 field for this cool Romanian postage stamp from the Science History Institute would be: 258 __ $a Romania : $b 1 leu

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

hello! idk if this has been asked yet but may I request a DDS classification for eldritch deities?

001.944 for monsters and related phenomena

111.1 for the metaphysics of existence

130 - 139 for parapsychology and the occult (135 for dreams, 132.1 for insanity)

299 for miscellaneous religions

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

What's 247.69

247.69 is unassigned, but falls under 247.6 for christian priesthood vestiments; palliums (scarf-tie-shawl thing), miters (pope hats), croziers (staffs), and rings

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

261.94?

(Random numbers, GO!)

261.94 is unassigned, but falls under 261 for "social theology and interreligious relations and attitudes," christianity as an arm of politics and socioeconomics

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

202.6?

miscellaneous christian doctrines

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

what's in 266.1

eastern orthodox missions

[your-dewey-decimal-number-is]

What is the Dewey Decimal number of Motif-index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folk-tales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends by Stith Thompson (1932)

It might be relevant for deicide reasons

that's filed under 398 for folklore

deicide, the killing of god(s), would probably be somewhere in the 200s for religion, maybe 202.112 (attributes of the gods)

looking up deicide on librarything mostly shows comic books, heavy metal albums, and right-wing bullshit about how woke is killing god