DDC/MDS info is wrong

The DDC/MDS information for Michael Arditti's The Celibate is wrong. It says "813
Literature > American literature > American Fiction" while the author is actually British and the book is set in England, so surely should be seen as British literature. But I can't see how to change the entry.

The DDC/MDS information for Michael Arditti's The Celibate is wrong. It says "813
Literature > American literature > American Fiction" while the author is actually British and the book is set in England, so surely should be seen as British literature. But I can't see how to change the entry.

You can change it on your own book entry the same as you change any other book data. As with pretty much everything else on the site, the work data is generated from the book data, with the majority one being what shows. In this case, as you can see from the Work Details, the current vote is 17-14, and I see in your catalog that your copy has "green", or calculated, data, so fixing it on your copy won't tip the balance but it will help.

Ah, thank you. I had the idea this came from some sort of "official" source like the Library of Congress.

It comes from the library that you import your books from so there must be some library out there that has it wrong.

There is, AIUI, actually no single official arbiter of Dewey classifications, as there is for LoC numbers, and so Deweys can legitimately differ. (In this case it seems to be a simple error, but in some non-fiction cases there really are two or more good options.)

The library catalog world contains many, many errors.

as a former cataloguer myself, each library "adjusts" where things are listed, be they right or wrong, to suit their set up and clientele. as is noted elsewhere, most fictional works are listed with a simple FIC, SF, F, HORROR, etc. and are all filed alphabetically by author within the general fiction section of the library without regard to the nationality of the author. Some will attempt to sort via subject matter but that tends to create more work and have resulted in the use of decorative stickers or labels denoting subject and filing as mentioned before. a book subject whose books tend to go missing easily might be reshelved under a differing subject related to said book in the hope that said book won't be permanently borrowed. Thus, having said all this, catalogues and the records listed might not match the realities of what the item is or should be. I'm constantly tweaking things when adding books to my library here. My current pet peeve is British authors being listed as American authors more on the subject of the work than on the nationality of the author which, according to my training, drives the build of the number. That makes Neil Gaiman's American Gods, though about an American subject not 813 but 823 as he's British, and yet I find it listed under 813 when there is a Dewey present consistently.