User:BorgQueen/Library-Bibliographical Classification: Difference between revisions

Library-Bibliographical Classification (Russian: Библиотечно-библиографическая классификация, romanized: Bibliotechno-Bibliograficheskaya Klassifikacija; abbreviated ББК, BBK,^[1]: 152 or LBC) is a library classification system developed in the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1960s. It is the principal library classification system used in Russia, where it remains the standard in most libraries. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some successor states adopted the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), while others continued to use LBC. According to the International Society for Knowledge Organization, LBC is among the largest universal classification systems.

Until the early 20th century, libraries in Russia did not have a unified national classification system. Major libraries developed their own systems, such as those created by Alexey Olenin in 1808 and Fyodor Reiss [ru] in 1826. They were primarily theoretical classifications of the sciences rather than practical bibliographic tools, and offered little guidance for cataloguing, shelving, or retrieval of documents. No general standards were adopted across provincial libraries; published guidelines for them merely suggested arranging books by discipline and separating fiction from scientific literature.^[2]: 3

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) was never introduced in Russia, but its European adaptation—the Decimal Classification of the International Bibliographic Institute, later known as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)—began to circulate at the turn of the twentieth century. The Russian bibliographer Boris Bodnarsky [ru] (1874–1968) was among its proponents. After the October Revolution of 1917, the centralization of Soviet librarianship was placed under Glavpolitprosvet (Main Political and Educational Committee), directed by Nadezhda Krupskaya under the People’s Commissariat for Education. A 1920 decree established a unified library network within the Russian SFSR, and in 1921 Glavpolitprosvet made the UDC obligatory for all public libraries, issuing abridged Russian-language editions in 1921, 1927, and 1931. Some librarians, however, criticized the UDC as incompatible with Marxist–Leninist principles of knowledge organization because it was founded on Western positivist assumptions that treated knowledge as neutral and universal rather than historically and ideologically situated. These critiques called for the creation of a distinctly Soviet classification system. The task of revising the UDC for Soviet use was led by Lev Naumovich Tropovsky [ru], who published his draft schedules in 1934 and a complete edition in 1938. His revisions reorganized the hierarchy of disciplines to foreground dialectical materialism and the social sciences at the head of the tables, followed by applied and natural sciences, and ending with literature and art. Within each class, works on Marxism, Leninism, and party history were given priority positions, while “bourgeois” philosophy and capitalist economics were subordinated or segregated into separate subclasses.^[3]

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