Last Monday, I attended a DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) introductory course during the ODOK conference in Salzburg. It was really interesting, and I think that the possibilities DDC offers (for example facet indicators) are useful. But then a fellow student pointed to the following article: "Hotel Being Sued for Using the Dewey Decimal System" (via Slashdot)
It says that OCLC is suing the Library Hotel in New York for trademark infringement. The cited Library Hotel "in New York City is the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the DDC. Each of the 10 guestrooms floors honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC and each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to." Nice place to be :-)
I think it might be dangerous to subdue oneself to OCLC's business practices - maybe libraries will be awaited by the same problems they currently have with electronic journals... What if Austrian libraries change their shelf classification to DDC, and suddenly OCLC imposes a price increase that libraries can't bear with their increasingly limited budgets...