Criticism of a Book Titled as Class BP: Extended Classification of Islam in Library of Congress Classification

A book titled as Class BP: Extended Classification BP of Islam in Library of Congress Classification, written by Ahmad Taheri Iraqi has been used more than 50 years to classify the library resources and also as a tool and guide for catalogers. The editors of the third edition of this book are Zohre Alavi, Zahra Sadat Modaresi and Mahboobeh Qorbani. It is obvious that writing and providing the extensions to classifications is so difficult, though there are shortages and insufficiencies in such works that become clear when they are used professionally at the libraries or special institutes. The present work is going to introduce the book briefly and then discuss the redundancies and insufficiencies based on experiencing and using the extension of it at libraries and also knowing and mastering in the area of Islamic science. We suggested some solutions for rectifying the insufficiencies of this book in order to make general usage. These suggestions are categorizing in 5 groups: first, the corrections that are effective in teaching cataloging; second, adding numbers for the appropriate headings which have bibliographic warrant; third, appropriate examples for some numbers; fourth, doing reformations for categorizing suitable subjects: and fifth, reformations that are meeting the politics of the libraries with the extensions that can be used in all of the special and public libraries.