So here I am trying to decide if a book is about "library orientation--united states" or "library research--united states" I think I would rather develop a career in thesaurus construction than to be the hapless cataloger trying to figure out the nuances of difference between 2 essentially similar ideas. This way, I get to come up with all the controlled vocabulary terms that catalogers must use in assigning subject headings to books.

Did you know that for some aspects of knowledge, a book's classification number is determined by adding 2 different numbers together? For example, to show that a book is about the history of forestry in the Soviet Union, one adds the number for the Soviet Union (63) to the base number for the history of forestry (144). This makes it 207 under the main class SD for forestry. (Yes, I know, this really doesn't make any sense). Here I was, thinking I had escaped math once and for all.