The London Education Classification is a library classification and indexing thesaurus used at the

UCL Institute of Education IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (IOE) is the education school of University College London (UCL). It specialises in postgraduate study and research in the field of education and is one of UCL's 11 constituent faculties. Prior to ...

. It was devised by D.J. Foskett and Joy Foskett. It was devised to address deficiencies in general classification schemes in dealing with education. It was originally devised in 1963, and revised in 1974. It is a

faceted classification A faceted classification is a classification scheme used in organizing knowledge into a systematic order. A faceted classification uses semantic categories, either general or subject-specific, that are combined to create the full classification en ...

, inspired by the work of

S.R. Ranganathan Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan ( 9 August 1892 – 27 September 1972) was a librarian and mathematician from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major fac ...

and of the

Classification Research Group The Classification Research Group (CRG) was a significant contributor to classification research and theory in the field of library and information science in the latter half of the 20th century. It was formed in England in 1952 and was active until ...

Main facets

Foiskett and Foskett observe: "The basic idea of facets is separate grouping of each major division of a subject.". Using the British Education Index and the

British National Bibliography The British National Bibliography (BNB) was established at the British Museum in 1949 to publish a list of the books, journals and serials that are published in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. It also includes information on forthcoming ...

, they divided educational terms into groups that are mutually exclusive. This forms the foundation of the classification sequence. In the LEC main facets are indicated by a capital letter, and terms in facets by lower case letters. Letters are arranged so that vowels and consonants alternate, so that the eventual notation will appear as a syllable. e.g. Thus, a work on "Wikipedia : the missing manual / John Broughton" would be shelved at shelved at With BRO being based on the author's name.

Indexing Thesaurus

As originally implemented, the shelf arrangement produced by the classification was supplemented by an indexed card catalogue, where index entries were created for each element in the classmark, in reverse order from the classification. The example Foskett and Foskett gave was: "Each entry refers the reader to the part of the classified section, Rid, where all entries on Secondary modern school are filed.". The 1974 second edition of the scheme was supplemented by

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym dictiona ...

cross referencing between narrow terms, broad terms and related terms.

References

Educational classification systems Controlled vocabularies UCL Institute of Education Library cataloging and classification {{library-stub