No one has ever devised a completely satisfactory classification scheme, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. This failing has always been ap… - Douglas John Foskett

" "

No one has ever devised a completely satisfactory classification scheme, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. This failing has always been apparent, but in recent years it has taken on increasingly urgent importance as scholarly literature has grown more complex and information retrieval more sophisticated. The library profession has long been aware of the difficulties created by the schemes available, but Foskett, librarian at the University of London's Institute of Education, has now examined the matter thoroughly in specific relation to the social sciences. He has written an immensely stimulating book, providing a perceptive critique of each of the existing classifications as well as new insight into possible solutions to the problems of classifying social science materials. He is very much in the Ranganathan camp and believes that the "facet analysis" which Ranganathan devised can conceivably supply the key to a much improved classification. He is especially taken with the more refined versions of this approach found in the work of the British Classification Research Group, ,and particularly in the work of Barbara Kyle. A schedule fashioned along these lines, he believes, would reveal subject. subdivisions and the relationships between subjects much more satisfactorily than any schedule used today. He would have a classification of such flexibility that any two concepts in the area of the social sciences could be related and this relation indicated in the notation of the material.