I’m keynoting a teacher’s conference in Texas. It’s being held in Irving, outside of Dallas, at the Academy of Irving, the local technology-focused public high school. It’s open and light. (My own high school, progressive though it was, instilled in me a lifelong fear of cinderblock.) And there’s wifi! My host told me on the drive from the hotel that it’s primarily a poor district, but this school does not feel that way. Good priorities.

The school library is modest but inviting. The books are shelved according to Dewey but the online catalog — there is no paper one — from The Library Corp doesn’t care about that. It seems mainly search-based, with suggestions of books and categories returned. While the Dewey hierarchy is offensive to modern sensibilities (and any stable hierarchy is going to be offensive to some because we just don’t agree on how knowledge is nested), shelved books exhibit no hierarchy, just a cloud of related topics. Now that the metadata is digital, the utility of Dewey’s shelving need not be marred by the provincialism of Dewey’s classification. [Tags: taxonomy DeweyDecimal EverythingIsMiscellaneous]

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