Social History and Industrial Classification (SHIC) is a

classification system Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes. It may also refer to: Business, organizat ...

used by many British museums for

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

and industrial collections. It was first published in 1983.

Purpose

SHIC was classifies materials (books, objects, recordings etc.) by their interaction with the people who used them. For example, a carpenter's hammer is classified with other tools of the carpenter, and not with a blacksmith's hammer. In contrast other classification systems, for example the

Dewey Decimal Classification The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), colloquially known as the Dewey Decimal System, is a proprietary library classification system which allows new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject. Section 4.1 ...

, might class all hammers together and close to the classification for other percussive tools. The specialist subject network, Social History Curator's Group (SHCG), obtained funding in 2012 to develop an on-line version, now on their website http://www.shcg.org.uk/

Scheme

Materials are classified under four major category numbers: #Community life #Domestic and family life #Personal life #Working life Further classification within a category is by the use of further numbers after the decimal point. It is permissible to assign more than one classification in cases where the object had more than one use.

References

{{reflist *''Social history and industrial classification (SHIC), a subject classification for museum collections'', University of Sheffield, 1983 Library cataloging and classification Knowledge representation Social history Industrial history