Inuit Circumpolar Council Classification Project

In the late spring and summer of 2024, I took a Young Canada Works position with the Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada Archives. The project I for was hired seemed huge in scale for five months, but was so unique that I had to apply. The ICC’s offices in Ottawa had a big number of books, reports, and DVD/CDs, which were mostly catalogued, but not classified according to any formal system, lacking any labels. In my position as the Cataloguing and Classification Librarian, I created a classification system tailored to the specific collection and institutional mandate of the organization – representing Inuit interests in international fora.

The project specified that the classifcation system was to be based on the Brian Deer model. Alec Brian Deer was a Kanien’kehá:ka librarian from Kahnawà:ke, near Montréal. As the librarian for the National Indian Brotherhood, (now the Assembly of First Nations) Deer developed his self-named library system as a replacement for Library of Congress Classification and Dewey Decimal System, which he viewed as irreconcilable with Indigenous needs. The system for assigning a call number involves assigning a combination of letters based on subject, then assigning a ‘cutter code’ (alphabetical shortening) of the place or community it was relevant to (in my case, which of the 6 Inuit homelands). After, the year of publication and author’s shortened name. That is the ordering used at the ICC. The system is not highly prescriptive, and allows for great variance according to collection.

Here is an example of the catalogue entry for a report in the ICC library:

Brian Deer classification is best suited to small libraries whose scope is limited, as it is necessarily non-universal – both a limitation and benefit. It does not have LCC or Dewey’s ability to easily classify all possible books (at least, in theory), but by limiting the topics, the call numbers become easier to intuit and browse. While the boundaries between different topics are subjective (e.g. ‘Inuit-Canadian government relations’ versus ‘Inuit self-governance’), the limited system (with a maximum of 26 highest-level categories, and no use of numbers as subject indicators) make assigning call numbers relatively simple.

The process of developing the ICC library classification system was complicated from the beginning. I dug into the library science literature, and reached out to whichever institutions employing a Brian Deer system were available. The topic is understudied and trial and error, alongside colleagues, was essential. I was a non-Inuk designing a system meant to reflect Inuit epistemological distinctions, and this necessitated extensive consulting with colleagues. An example of an important distinction that arose early on was between ‘ice’ and ‘water’. Some other classification systems combined them under a term like ‘hydrosphere’ or just ‘water’, with frozen water being a subset. However, there is a common Inuit distinction between ground/earth, open water, and sea ice as mutually exclusive parts of of ‘the land’, a term which encompasses all and is closer in usage to ‘the environment’ than to how it is often used (solid ground). My magnanimous colleagues took time to speak with me, whether in-office or online, and they lent me their expert perspective. This process of collaboration and teamwork allowed me to bring the knowledge about classification systems I gained in the ÉSIS program to a unique institution, and move beyond the limits of what I learned in class. 

Once a scheme was finalized (with room left for new categories to be added), more than 1000 materials were assigned call numbers and labeled. The final result is a functional, navigable library which offers value to its patrons.