All Ball.
A Subject Classification
Subject Area:
The subject around which my classification scheme revolves is the game of basketball (bskt-bôl), which Merriam-Webster defines as “a usually indoor game between two teams of usually five players each who score by tossing an inflated ball through a raised goal.” The American Heritage Dictionary adds that this raised goal, or “elevated basket,” is “on the opponent’s side of a rectangular court,” which, in all likelihood, is why the opponent is supposed to defend the goal. Basketball can also refer to the ball with which the game of basketball is played and, in an attempt to disambiguate the terms, will, in this context, heretofore be referred to simply as ball.
Intended Audience:
The intended user group for my subject classification scheme includes American youth, with a working age bracket – subject to expand, if need be – of 8 to 13, who are interested in playing sports and, more particularly, in playing the game of basketball, as well as the youth’s parents/guardians and other parties that influence their paths of early development (i.e. extended family, teachers, coaches, close family friends one calls “Aunt” or “Uncle” though they are not, in fact, one’s blood relative, community leaders [broadly])
Associated Purpose:
The purpose of the subject classification scheme, then, is to provide information that will educate all members of the intended audience, particularly about the grand scheme of the rules, elements, and culture of basketball in America, as well as a tailoring towards the youth’s involvement, both mentally and physically, in the sport itself. Also, including, for instance, refereeing and coaching as categories not only informs the entire audience about two of the fundamental non-player components of organized basketball, but also points to methods in which the parents/guardians and other influential parties can involve themselves in the sport, if they so desired. Ultimately, the goal of the classification is to help influence youth to utilize their budding motor skills through committing themselves to participate in organized basketball, as well as to show those that influence them how they can actively support such commitment.
Resulting Interpretation of the Subject:
With this audience and purpose, it is evident that scholarly journal articles that attempt to insert a degree of intellectualism into the game of basketball should not be included. Sure, the elder parents/guardians and other influential parties may be interested in reading such articles, and they certainly have their merit, just not for a scheme directed at educating youth about, and influencing youth towards, the game of basketball. Rather, the scheme covers the everyman’s, so to speak, subject areas of the game of basketball. It accounts for differences in gender as well as league and level of competition, and primarily arranges these differences with regard to which perspective they attend to, the Player, the Coach, the Referee, or an Objective perspective. Because of the nature of the scheme, the classification structure emphasizes youth players, and is organized so that youth-oriented materials are at the forefront of a physical shelf arrangement. Resources that hail to this audience and purpose can generally be classified into one the following five components, or facets: (1) Materials, where resources would fall into the Gear, Equipment, and Courts & Arenas categories; (2) Techniques & Practices, which has a categorical makeup of Basics, Related Games & Activities, Drills, and Conditioning/Training/Routines; (3) Guidelines, which is comprised of Rules, Playbooks, Information about Injuries, Eligibility, and Recruitment; (4) Values, which has three categories – Sportsmanship, Teamwork, and Leadership; and (5) Concentration, which focuses in on three areas – American Studies, History, and Sociology. These last three concentrations, as well as Drills and Conditioning/Training/Routines in the Techniques & Practices facet also have subcategories attached to them, into which resources about the overarching category may or may not fall. Drills has a Position-Specific subcategory, Conditioning/Training/Routines a Camps subcategory, American Studies has three subcategories – Hobbying, Iconography, and Mini-Cultures, while History (Chronology) and Sociology (Race) have just one. This is the entire categorical makeup for the audience and purpose of this classification. All items that do not fit, basketball-related or otherwise, should be excluded.
Guidelines for Assigning Resources to Categories:
Generally speaking, the faceted nature of the classification scheme does not allow for cross-classification, nor for the resources to fall into multiple categories. It does, however, allow for broad and narrow searches where one would find some of the same resources in their narrow search as they would find in a broader search.
For example, should an aspiring player want to find resources about eligibility for playing college-level basketball, the best way to do so would be to choose Player in the perspective facet, College in the type of league facet, and Eligibility in the guidelines facet. However, one could also, eventually, arrive at this resource simply by choosing Player in the perspective facet, or simply College in the type of league facet, though one would have the greatest amount of precision with a single facet search on this particular resource if they simply chose Eligibility in the guidelines facet. Here also is an example of where the gender facet would, more than likely, make no difference in resource retrieval. Eligibility to play in the NCAA, for instance, is the same for NCAA women’s basketball as it is for men’s, and so resources on eligibility would not be particularly helpful to one gender over the other in the same way that, say, playbooks would. So, while the gender facet here is moot, using it would not hurt retrieval; ideally, choosing Male in the gender facet would yield the same results as choosing Female as would choosing Male and Female as would choosing neither – again, since gender is not an important factor in being eligible to play at the college level.
The perspective and gender facets are fixed. It is to be assumed that there are no perspectives, with regard to this particular audience and purpose, outside of player, objective, coach, and referee. And while gender is a little more complicated, since one may search “boy’s” or “girl’s” or “men’s” or “women’s,” etc. instead of male and female, but it is generally easy to default such synonyms to these preferred terms, and since the facet is indeed called gender, it makes sense to have male and female as the preferred terms. What’s more, this facet allows for the search of resources that resonate with both males and females, as well as resources where gender is not distinguished.
Of course, a search in any of the other facets could not possibly be so fixed. If someone, for instance, wanted to search for information about the 1993-94 NBA champions, they would not search for Objective in the perspective facet, Professional in the type of league facet, Male in the gender facet, and History, or its subcategory Chronology, in the concentration facet. But these are the overarching categories that such a search would fall into – NBA implies professional male basketball, 1993-94 implies an historical time period, and champions is shorthand for the team who was awarded the league championship, who will go down in history for having done so. Histories also tend to imply an objective perspective in the same manner that basic skill development and recruitment imply the player perspective. All said and done, this search would retrieve all available resources that discuss, if not exclusively, the Houston Rockets’ first championship season.
The facets in this classification structure are arranged hierarchically, in this order: Perspective, Type of League, Gender, Techniques & Practices, Guidelines, Values, Concentration, and Materials. With regard to the audience and purpose, I believe this is the most practical order. Of course, this is most relevant to the physical shelving and retrieval of the resources, and not particularly important to primary database searches. So, if one were to imagine all of these resources shelved together, I believe the perspective facet takes top priority, so that all of the resources from the player’s perspective are shelved together, and then from the objective perspective, then from the coach’s perspective, and finally from the referee’s. This seems most true to the nature of the purpose of the classification – so that the resources most relevant to aspiring players would be right up front, but there would still be a clear delineation, a clear section to look to, for those parents/guardians and other influential persons interested in coaching or refereeing. Since the primary audience is youth and the intention getting these youth to express interest in participating in the game of basketball, it makes sense that they would be more interested in resources from the Objective perspective – most of the resources that fall into the categories within the Concentration facet, for instance – than they would resources about Coaching or Refereeing basketball, but less so than resources about their physical involvement in the game.
The second most important facet, I believe, is the type of league, which is arranged on the evolutionary principle and, incidentally, by level of competition, as well as on a traditional to nontraditional spectrum. Nontraditional leagues like wheelchair leagues, streetball leagues, and exhibition-type leagues (such as the one the Harlem Globetrotters play in) should be included, but cannot be easily placed on the more traditional, evolutionary scale and so, for all intents and purposes, find their place at the end. This way, for instance, should one want resources about coaching urban development leagues, they would be able to locate them at the beginning of the coaching section with all of the other resources on coaching youth league basketball.
What about a non-league-specific encyclopedia of basketball, one may ask? Well, that would be an objective history of sorts, and so precede league-specific resources on the shelf. Numerically speaking, objective is second on the perspective facet, and so can be designated a 2. Next, the type of league facet is not in use, and so it is defaulted a 0. Supposing that items are shelved, then, in numerical order, anything with a 20--.- precedes anything specific to a league.
Another quick note on Type of League. Choosing Youth from the Type of League facet does not necessarily imply that you are looking for information on youth leagues, per se. Rather, Youth should include all youth-oriented documents on learning the basics, related games and activities, drills, etc. even though it is not league-specific. This way, it serves as a sort of jump-off place for all youth interested in learning to play basketball and not just youth interested in playing organized basketball.
Gender is third, for this reason: I believe, for instance, that all items regarding playing in the NCAA should be shelved together. This way, the shelving of such items remains true to the evolutionary principle of the type of league facet. If gender preceded type of league, all of the information on every female league would precede all of the information on every male league (I have arbitrarily, perhaps alphabetically, arranged female to precede male in the gender facet). This would also disrupt the resources that pay no attention to gender – for instance, the aforementioned NCAA eligibility resources. If NCAA men’s basketball were separate from NCAA women’s, where would these resources go? This preferred order allays this potential problem.
Materials, Techniques & Practices, Guidelines, Values, and Concentration are the last five facets, in that order. Again, this seems most true to the intended audience and purpose of the scheme. An aspiring player would more than likely want materials that inform the reader on the physical aspects (materials, techniques & practices) of the game before they would want to know how to mentally prepare for it (guidelines, values). Further, knowing what materials are required for playing precedes physical involvement in the sport. That is, you need a ball and a goal before you try to learn to shoot. Regarding the mental aspects, learning the rules of the game precludes – and, moreover, are implicit in – becoming a team leader or even a team player, and the shelf placement of resources about these types of things should reflect that. The Materials, Techniques & Practices, Guidelines, and Values facets, then, are arranged on the evolutionary principle. It also makes sense – again, with the intended audience and purpose in mind – for Concentration to be the least important of the facets. Sure, it is important that it is there, as knowledge of why and how basketball exists in our culture and why we continue to play it are crucial to a complete understanding of the sport. But one can express interest in playing the sport before one expresses interest in understanding the sport, and, while both are important, the scheme stresses play over understanding. So its placement follows the evolutionary principle as well, from understanding how to play as an individual to understanding the broader culture of the game, within which playing as an individual is a principal element.
Here might be a good place to describe how one would go about numerically classifying the resources. Each resource will have a numeric representation in this format:
_ _ _ _._ _
The first slot will either have a value of 1, 2, 3, or 4, depending upon which perspective each particular resource uses. Assuming these resources will be shelved in numerical order, 1 is designated to the Player perspective, 2 the Objective perspective, 3 the Coach perspective, and 4 the Referee perspective.
The second slot is for type of league, and can be given an integer value anywhere between 0 and 7. As with the encyclopedia example, non-league specific materials default to a 0 and are placed ahead of all league-specific materials. Perspective does not include a 0 default because it is assumed, for this classification scheme, that there are no perspectives other than the four listed. However, when a resource is neither from the Player nor the Coach nor the Referee perspective, it defaults to a 2, for the Objective perspective. When resources are league-specific, 1 is designated for Youth “leagues”, 2 for High School leagues, 3 for College leagues, 4 for Minor Leagues, 5 for Professional Leagues, 6 for International leagues, and 7 for Nontraditional leagues. Should multiple leagues appear in the same resource, it will be shelved at its lowest value. For instance, resources that pertain to both Youth and High School levels of play would be designated a 1 in the second slot and be shelved along with all of the other Youth “league” materials.
The third slot will have a value of 0, 1, or 2, depending upon which gender you are searching for resources about, as well as whether choice of gender is consequential to your search. For example, the earlier example of eligibility to play college-level basketball does not depend upon gender, but rather is uniform throughout the organization. These types of resources would have a 0 in the third slot. When gender is consequential, 1 is designated to the Female gender and 2 is designated to the Male gender.
The fourth slot requires some explanation. For all intents and purposes, the last five facets – Materials, Techniques & Practices, Guidelines, Values, and Concentration – are disjoint. Resources about properly shooting a ball are not about injuries are not about the socioeconomic impact of March Madness on American culture, etc. Discovering resources that attend to more than one of these facets at once would be extremely rare. If this problem does arise, however, the resource should be shelved with respect to the category it covers that is lowest on the evolutionary scale of these five facets. The classified structure still allows for a search where you can choose from all eight facets at once, and even to choose multiple categories within each facet at once, but doing so – searching for resources that cover both iconography and basketball camps and recruitment, for example – would likely result in zero retrieved documents. Thus, it seems more practical to designate the fourth slot to the final five disjoint facets than to have eight slots, when at least four of them aren’t likely to be used. Also, representing them numerically in separate slots would trigger a reverse shelving order. That is, 11200003 < 11200030 < 11200300 < 11203000 < 11230000. So the fourth slot, then, will be designated either a 1, a 2, a 3, a 4, or a 5, where 1 represents the Materials facet, 2 the Techniques & Practices facet, 3 the Guidelines facet, 4 the Values facet, and 5 the concentration facet.
Further, the categories that fall within each facet would be represented by the fifth slot, on the other side of the decimal point, of the numeric representation. The sixth slot, when applicable, is allotted the value of the subcategory within the category within the facet. I will further delineate this by going a little more into detail about each of these five facets. One note beforehand. Just as with the Type of League facet, when resources fall into multiple categories in any of these final five facets, they will be organized in accordance with their inclusion with the category hierarchically highest within each facet. For example, resources that are about Eligibility and Recruitment will be placed with the resources about Eligibility because the Eligibility category is arranged higher than Recruitment within the Guidelines facet.