Choosing a BISAC Category

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Choosing a BISAC Category

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1WTNaud
jan 1, 2012, 12:40 pm

The BISAC sytem is a stinking way to categorize the nature of a book. How do you categorize a Non-Fiction Humorous Korean War Memoir that includes a Love story. It is witty humor mixed with war codebreaker drama, not blood and guts, not hahha humor.
So choosing between 'History' where the book is grouped(and competing against especially for awards)with heavy duty fact historical event description or 'Humor' where the book is grouped with(and award competing with)more Erma Bombeck stuff. Don't want to lose readers by being in wrong section.
As a librarian how would you categorize a behind the senes Korean War drama,no blood and guts, mild witty humor with a compassionate story of war effects on a population with an unlikely love story mixed in.

2jjwilson61
jan 1, 2012, 12:44 pm

That's a problem with any categorization system. You can only put a book in one place on the shelves. On the other hand you can put it under as many categories as makes sense in your catalog.

3aulsmith
jan 1, 2012, 1:05 pm

Remember that BISAC was designed for bookstores where you presumably have multiple copies of the book and you can put them in different places. That's why I think it's a terrible system for libraries. However, here's what I'd do if I wanted it one place in the BISAC system:

What is the general intent of the book:

Is it mostly about the person's life?: MEMOIRS
Is it how the person's life interacted with historical events?: HISTORY
Is it mostly a book of funny stories which incidentally tell you something about the author's life and the Korean War?: HUMOR

4isaac32767
dec 12, 2018, 5:38 pm

I'm looking to catalog my personal library of maybe 200 books. BISAC seems a very good fit for me. The ambiguity that WTNaud complains about is actually a positive feature for me: it allows me to assign categories that correspond to the way I use them. By contrast, LCC and DDC put related books all over the place. I want my computer books together, not divided between Physical Science and Technology, the way LCC does.

I'm no librarian, but for a small public library, BISAC seems a lot more patron-friendly than DDC.

5WeeTurtle
dec 13, 2018, 2:01 am

I just looked this up as I hadn't' heard of it and it does seem like something that would fit for cataloging my "collection" since it's quite small. DDC and LCC can lack desired specificity in areas or have too much in others.

When assigning a book to a collection, I imagine a person browsing and put the book where I suspect it would catch the attention of a person who I think would most appreciate it. A person searching for something specific I expect would be looking at the catalogue.

With the opening example, would the book appeal more to someone interested in reading about people's lives (memoir/biography), or to a history buff? I would shelve it accordingly but put the book in the primary category.

For my personal library, I've decided to limit a book's potential collections to two, with the primary collection being where it lives. If the primary collection is not obvious, then an imaginary patron has only two places to look for it.

6Cynfelyn
dec 13, 2018, 12:10 pm

Not BISAC, I know, but out of interest, I looked up what Manchester and Birmingham public library catalogues (https://manchester.spydus.co.uk and https://birmingham.spydus.co.uk respectively) had done with Spike Milligan's books, Adolf Hitler : my part in his downfall, "Rommel?" "Gunner who?", Monty : his part in my victory and Mussolini : his part in my downfall, which feel like a useful British WWII analogue for the OP's Non-Fiction Humorous Korean War Memoir.

The answer is 828.914 (with an audiobook at 827.91), which according to https://www.librarything.com/mds/828.914 is that most anodyne of classifications, " English miscellaneous writings 1945-1999". Not history, nor biography, nor humour. Not being a librarian, I confess I'm disappointed.