Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2023
Abstract
Classification is a notoriously messy business that requires compromises and rarely has clear-cut answers, but nowhere is this more evident than in the field of religious texts. Sacred religious texts such as the Bible have been through more iterations than can be counted. They are used by different communities in different ways. What some communities view as mythology, others view as historical fact. Placing such complex, living texts into stagnant, neat boxes can be almost impossible. The field of religion is also historically burdened by bias, and the DDC in particular has a notoriously unbalanced representation of religion, with Christianity occupying a disproportionately massive dominance of the 200s section of the classification scheme. However, by examining the ways in which such texts are classified, one can learn much about how classification works. This paper will examine the bibliographic descriptions of two sacred texts belonging to Christianity: the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The two texts are similar in that they are both sacred texts of Christianity, but they are different in that one has seen enormously wide usage, while the other is embraced only by a relatively small sect of Christianity. The similarities and differences in how these two texts are classified and described by systems such as the DDC, the LCC, and MARC can be revealing of how these texts are understood by cataloguers.