Dewey Decimal Sorting

Is there any way to sort your books by Dewey Decimal Number? If not, that'd be a good feature to have!

If you go to "Your Library" and edit one of the display styles ("edit" link to the right of the A,B,C...) to show the DDN in one of the columns. You can then switch to that view, and click the heading "Dewey No." to sort by that column, or click it again to sort in reverse order.

I tried doing this but it sorts first on books with no DDN. How can books have no DDN? I don't have many books published before the 50s and I know there was a Dewey Decimal System back then. I really like the idea of sorting on the DDN, especially for non-fiction, but . . .

Yes books without a dewey number will come first because it's essentially "null". It depends where you add your books from, e.g. Amazon do not (to my knowledge) list DDN's, however if you add from a Library you are likely to end up with a dewey number and/or a LOC number.

It also pays to note that LibraryThing will "guess" the DDN if a number of other users have a DDN for their copy of the work, either they entered it manually or got it from a different source - those numbers will show in green.

For the items missing Dewey numbers, you can always surf over to a Dewey using library (i.e., public) and copy the number they have the item cataloged in (assume it's correct, ignorance is bliss). Or, you can always buy a copy of the DDC22 and AACRII and have at it!

Sorry for jumping on an ancient thread, but this needs addressing. You can't sort by Dewey. I have classified my entire library by Dewey, and this is becoming an issue.

What's been suggested sort of works, but the sorting order is inconsistent. For example, 222.10 comes AFTER 222.9 which makes sense neither mathematically or ontologically.

Oh, so Dewey Sorting has the same problem as LoC sorting? Great. *sigh*

>6 markbarnes: It makes sense, mathematically, if the sorter starts counting after the decimal, which means it's seeing just 9 and 10 and so puts them in numerical order in response. Perhaps it's something about the decimal that causes a separation and disallows the numbers 222.9 and 222.10 to be considered as a whole.

This sounds like an alpha sort vs. numeric sort issue, but I can't reproduce it, either in my catalog or markbarnes's. Even looking very specifically at the 222's in his catalog, they are numerically sorting correctly.

What I DO see, and what may be the cause of his confusion, is that Deweys are not punctuated consistently. 222.10 is correctly before 222.9, but 222\.10 is after 222.9, because the SLASH MATTERS IN THE SORT. This isn't the sort of thing that could easily be fixed by changing from 'sort' to 'sort numeric' as the initial statement of the problem implied. However, if you edit the Dewey data in your own catalog to remove the slashes, it will sort properly.

Moral of the story: it's important that you document EXACTLY what is happening, not what you THINK is happening. Otherwise people can't be very helpful.

>1 stavner: This 14 year old answer doesn't work as there is no display style with DDN in it.

You can add the Dewey classification to any of your display styles. Click on 'Settings' in Your Books.

In general, don't count on old topics giving you current advice. A lot has changed here in the past years.

Since the thread already got revived, thought I'd also mention, for those who don't know the DDC/MDC number for a next and want an easy way to look it up... I use the ~experimental~ OCLC 'Classify' tool. It also works for LCC, if you're into that kind of thing ;)
http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/

>12 chris.d: Or just use some library source, not Amazon, which is advisable for multiple reasons anyway. But yes, OCLC classify is great source for DDC and LCC. They provide classification assigned by all libraries that are part of WorldCat