Iara Lima

Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to find a specific item in a library that holds over 184 million items?

I’m not talking about finding a book on a shelf.

I’m talking about finding something in one of the largest documentary collections in the world.

The existence of a library of this size seems almost impossible when we think about the amount of information that needs to be organized so that what has been preserved can be found again.

And perhaps that is precisely where one of the most interesting things about Library Science lies. A library is not just a place where documents are stored, it is a system created to make it possible to find them.

In Information Science, we do not study books as physical objects, nor specific documents, because they are all supports. We study and classify information.

Long before paper, knowledge was already recorded and organized on completely different supports. In Mesopotamia, clay tablets with cuneiform writing preserved administrative, religious, literary, scientific, and legal documents for thousands of years.

Some of these collections are called libraries or archives, although these categories do not always correspond exactly to what we understand today as a library.

And that already teaches us something.

Organizing knowledge has never been a simple task.

And there has never been a single model.

The ancient city of Ebla, in present-day Syria, revealed thousands of tablets that were organized in different spaces of the palace. Centuries later, in Nineveh, the collection associated with the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal brought together tens of thousands of tablets and fragments, many of them containing texts copied, gathered, or produced by the king’s own order.

When we speak of ancient libraries, there is a tendency to imagine that the problem was simply storing knowledge, but storing is only part of the issue, the other part is knowing where it is.

And that is the point at which humanity, for thousands of years, has been questioning itself.

The Library of Alexandria, founded in Hellenistic Egypt, represented an important shift in the very conception of a library. Knowledge should not only be accumulated, it should be consulted, studied, compared, and used.

The library ceases then to be merely a repository and becomes also an infrastructure for knowledge.

Centuries later, collections became even larger, and the problems of organization grew as well.

The Library of Congress, in the United States, currently holds over 184 million physical items and maintains collections that include books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, sheet music, films, recordings, and digital materials.

And to locate specific information in this collection, a classification system is needed, a kind of invisible architecture that operates within the library. And there are different systems because there are different needs.

The Dewey Decimal Classification, created by Melvil Dewey in 1876, organizes knowledge into large numerical classes that can be progressively subdivided. The Universal Decimal Classification, later developed from Dewey’s proposal, expanded this logic to allow for more complex relationships between subjects. The Library of Congress, in turn, uses its own system based on letters and numbers.

If I look for a book about embroidery in a library that uses DDC, I may find the classification 746.44, within the area of textile arts. In a system based on LoC, general works on embroidery may appear under NK 9200, within the area of decorative arts. Notice that there is no exclusive classification for embroidery and this has already become the subject of my undergraduate thesis. But the interesting thing is not to memorize these numbers, but just to perceive what they do, because they transform a word into an address.

“Embroidery” ceases to be merely a word written on a book’s title and comes to occupy a position within a larger structure. And this structure allows relationships to be established.

That is why a good classification can produce discoveries that were not necessarily anticipated in the original search. The organization of knowledge not only allows us to find what we were already looking for, it can also show us what we didn’t yet know we were looking for.

And there is an important difference between classifying and organizing. Classifying is establishing a relationship between an object and a structure; organizing is creating conditions for that relationship to be retrieved later.

The number on the spine, for example, is not simply a label—it functions as an address within a given system.

And when you manage to find it, there is also the realization of an ancient promise of Library Science: that what has been preserved can be found again.