C lassification is the act of systematically grouping similar things together. Within this study, the term "classification" refers to assigning call numbers that reflect subject content and are intended to support logical browsing of physical or virtual locations. Libraries continue to debate the question of how to best classify and provide access to video materials. While giving a presentation on the topic of video collections at a state library conference, the authors learned that libraries are using a wider variety of video classification and organization practices than we anticipated. That raised questions for us. We wanted to know whether this variation was a regional phenomenon or a general practice. Additionally, we also wanted to know whether librarians generally believed that their local practices for classifying videos adequately helped patrons. Therefore we decided to survey catalogers, media librarians (media selectors who may also do media cataloging), and generalists interested in video classification. We chose the survey method because it is an inexpensive way to obtain a broad range of responses from a wide audience nationally and, possibly, internationally. The authors anticipated that this would help identify areas requiring additional research. Because our research questions stemmed from a discussion with a diverse group of librarians, we intentionally tried to obtain responses that reflected the diversity of the profession for library type (academic, public, etc.) and organizational role (cataloging, collection development, etc.).An additional idea that we had is that catalogers are enculturated to follow standard cataloging practices to insure interoperability between computer systems and to provide a consistent experience for patrons.1 However, in her article on classification based on sameness and difference, Olson stated, I would like to build on the idea of diversity rather than universality as a way of accommodating our diverse users and collections and, thus, decreasing levels of bias. To do so requires a variety of approaches-not only can we not have a universal solution, we cannot even have a universal method for achieving solutions.
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