Government of Canada Publications: Outline of Classification

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

The first edition of this outline was in 1955, but it was last revised in 1970. Thus, the fourth edition, updated to late 1983, has been a long time coming, and it should certainly be welcomed with open arms by government documents librarians everywhere, especially those who deal with Canadian federal government documents. This outline is used by all libraries that shelve all or part of their depository collections of documents by the Supply and Services Catalogue number. In addition, as a great bonus, the catalogue is full of information and explanations about the movements of departments, agencies, sections, and so forth. These “history cards” are invaluable. Even so, the names are based on those used for actual government catalogues and not on AACR2 or Canadiana Authorities.

Over the past 30 years, much of this classification scheme (which is ultimately a shelflist) has been a mad jumble because of haphazard development, lack of formal rules that define classes, and generally slipshod methods that sometimes never made sense. All of this has been brought down to 1983 and given a code of some sort. Librarians can work with any classification scheme if there is sufficient detail to explain its use. And that this outline has.