Student Theses
Date of Award
Spring 2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
History
Language
English
First Advisor
Thomas Ort
Second Advisor
Grace Davie
Abstract
This capstone traces the history of “Subclass DJK: Eastern Europe (general)” to reveal how Cold War politics have shaped the way information is arranged and understood in libraries today. In 1976, Subclass DJK was added to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) as just one of a series of revisions made in the mid-1970s and 1980s aimed at updating how American libraries organized and classified Eastern European historical information. As a result, the Cold War political landscape of Europe became inscribed in the LCC, including the existence of Eastern Europe, signified with Subclass DJK, as a political, social, and economic bloc. Inspired by both critical library scholarship and the intellectual history of Eastern Europe, this historical analysis illuminates the invented nature of the LCC, displaying the importance of understanding the historical context in which systems of classification and categorization are created, reused, and revised.
Recommended Citation
Carra, Regina, "The Story of "Subclass DJK- Eastern Europe (general)": Cold War Politics in the Organization of Knowledge" (2018). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/qc_etds/10
Comments
Some slight changes were made by the author of this capstone essay to enhance its clarity upon submission to the CUNY Academic Works repository in 2022. The author would like to note that this capstone was later adapted and published as a journal article. The citation for this article is as follows:
Carra, Regina. “DJK: (Re)Inventing Eastern Europe in the Library of Congress Classification.” Slavic & East European Information Resources 22, no. 1 (2021): 6–31.