Ditching Dewey

January 16, 2024

Heather D. Martin

To Dewey, or not to Dewey, that is the question. The question that more and more libraries - both public and school based - are asking.

Personally, I think it is one of the most interesting conversations that libraries have ever had. It’s complicated.

First off, credit where credit is due.?

Before Dewey, library organization was a mess. Books had specific locations where they belonged but “…libraries had items on the shelf in the order they were acquired, which could make it difficult to fin[d] what you were looking for.” (Smith)

I can’t even imagine.

Then, in 1876, Melvil Dewey came along and changed all that with his revolutionary system of highly organized, thematic groupings.? Suddenly, the shelves made sense.

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) quickly became the adopted standard for libraries and rote memorization of the numerical categories became a part of basic training for librarians.?

It is the gold standard. It is also fundamentally flawed.

Melvil Dewey was smart, but he was also a cad. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the truth of it. Dewey was an antisemitic, classist, racist, woman grabbing misogynist (Blakemore) whose opinions are part and parcel of the system he created. Where a book is shelved, and by extension, where a book “belongs,” is tainted by his prejudice. (Joseph) Not all cultures, not all people, are treated equally (Landrigos).

Far from being ‘revisionist history,’ these deeply troubling character flaws were known, and publicly decried, in his own time.? In fact, thanks to his reprehensible behavior, by 1906 Dewey had been forcibly kicked out of the American Library Association, an organization he himself founded (Blakemore).

John Cotton Dana, the man who opened the stacks for public lending and created the first Children’s Rooms (Anonymous) said?

“The library should be a commonplace to every one. To use it should be as natural when one needs news or knowledge, fiction or fact, as it is to use the trolley when one needs transportation.”?

This is yet another strike against the DDC as the elementary school students who use my library have not yet even been introduced to decimals. Therefore, not only were they forever mystified on how to find the book they wanted, they were also repeatedly given the subtle message that the library was maybe not for them.?

For all those reasons I, along with scores of other librarians, decided that the Dewey Decimal system had to go.

The tricky part is: if not Dewey, then what?

Because you see, while there are lots of educators, scholars, and librarians who agree it needs to go, no one has yet put forth a universally agreed upon system to replace it. Hm. Daunting.

But not for long. After all, what is a librarian if not a creative thinker who enjoys wrangling chaos into logical order?

I decided, as have others, to create my own system. One that served my patrons.

Thankfully, the fiction section of our library had already been overhauled and genrefied by the librarian before me. I considered that half the job done.?

Other sections were pretty easy to tackle. Setting poetry in its own freestanding bookcase and replacing the spine label designations, “821.914” and the like became “POEM” for example, was satisfying.?

After that… things got a little sticky.

I decided to use my own, slightly altered, version of what I’d heard other librarians refer to as “the bookstore method.” That is, to organize the shelves in a manner similar to bookstores which group their books in the way that customers can most easily find what they want, and might be tempted to pick up a similar title while they’re at it.?

However, knowing the students would be headed from our library to the junior high, where the DDC was still employed except without reference to its namesake, we decided to keep numbers as well. No decimals, but numbers with thematic groupings by the 100’s.?

Each “100’s” grouping has its own distinct theme, but they do not align with those of the DDC. Instead, they align with the use patterns of our patrons.

I am going to confess right now, even after the long overdue weeding, it wasn’t as easy or as foolproof as I had hoped. I spent a year developing spreadsheets and mind maps… but you just can’t predict the sort of troubles you are going to get yourself into until you are waist deep in mammal books, agonizing over the question of should you separate them out by species? By genus? Or lump them? And oh my goodness, if I wanted the shelves to really make sense to the kids, there are specific sight lines where I needed new sections to begin. No one understands the intricate jigsaw of book placement like a librarian who has recently relabeled.?

The wise, and sane, Mrs. Reich (Library Ed Tech extraordinaire) developed the mantra “think about it like a kid.” Kids don’t care about respiratory system versus circulatory system - so go ahead and simplify by putting all of the human body books together. However, kids who want baseball books will get frustrated if they have to sift through soccer and swimming and tennis to find them, so go ahead and divide out the sports.? The mantra helped.

I kept (and revised) a detailed spreadsheet of categorization and call numbers. I sought input from fellow librarians I trusted to tell me when they thought I’d jumped the rails. I beta tested entire sections.

Even so, I made mistakes. More than once I had to stop, rip labels off entire sections I’d barely reshelved, and start again. I had to continually remind myself that what I tell the kids is true for myself as well - that mistakes are not to be avoided, they are to be embraced. That is where the good stuff happens.

Reclassifying the nonfiction section also required a massive stack of labels, more tape than I imagined possible, and a lot more time than I had budgeted.?

I thought it would take me the first two, maybe three, weeks of summer vacation. Ha! Even with family members drafted into service, it took me all of summer vacation, including late nights and weekends, and throughout all of the next school year as well. I labeled the last big batch exactly one full year after the date I started. A small pile of stragglers still sits in my office.

At the end of the process, I can say this: it wasn’t easy. Heck, it might not really be the “end.” I’m still learning, still rethinking, still refining. Which is as it should be I suppose.

Nevertheless, I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the right call to make.?

It used to be that students only really used the nonfiction section when they had been sent there “on assignment” by a teacher. Now it is an active, vibrant part of the library with students regularly roaming the shelves in search of books to satisfy their own curiosity and reading pleasure!

It used to be that every class would find me racing against the clock to locate books needed by a long line of bewildered students unable to navigate the shelving system. Now my time is spent in meaningful discussions with them on the nature of classification systems in general, examples of different classification systems at other places, the nitty gritty of how call numbers work, and wondering out loud “if you were the librarian, how might you do it?”? They are able to find the books for themselves.

So, yes. The new system isn’t perfect (yet). It was a lot of work, and took a lot of resources, but seeing the students navigate with confidence and a sense of ownership in the collection makes it all so much more than worth it.?

Classification index available upon request

Sources

Anonymous. “Who Was John Cotton Dana and What Is That Award About?” News and Press Center, 27 Dec. 2012, www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2010/10/who-was-john-cotton-dana-and-what-award-about.?

Blakemore , Erin. “The Father of Modern Libraries Was a Serial Sexual Harasser.” History.Com, A&E Television Networks, www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-libraries-was-a-serial-sexual-harasser. Accessed 13 Jan. 2024.?

Dana, John Cotton, and William A. Peniston. The New Museum. The Newark Museum Association, 1999.?

Dana, John Cotton. Libraries: Addresses and Essays. Books for Libraries Press. P. 148

Joseph, Christina. “Move over, Melvil! Momentum Grows to Eliminate Bias and Racism in the 145-Year-Old Dewey Decimal System.” School Library Journal, www.slj.com/story/move-over-melvil-momentum-grows-to-eliminate-bias-and-racism-in-the-145-year-old-dewey-decimal-system. Accessed 13 Jan. 2024.?

Landrigan, Leslie. “Melvil Dewey, the Womanizing OCD Librarian Who Organized the Olympics.” New England Historical Society, 3 Apr. 2022, newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/melvil-dewey-the-womanizing-ocd-librarian-who-organized-the-olympics/.?

“Libguides: Dewey Decimal System: We Need to Talk about Melvil Dewey.” We Need to Talk About Melvil Dewey - Dewey Decimal System - LibGuides at Pratt Institute, libguides.pratt.edu/dewey-decimal-system/melvil-dewey. Accessed 13 Jan. 2024.?

Noel. “Local History Thursday: John Cotton Dana, the Librarian Who Opened Book Collections to the Public.” Mesa County Libraries, 14 May 2020, mesacountylibraries.org/2020/05/local-history-thursday-john-cotton-dana-the-librarian-who-opened-book-collections-to-the-public/.?

Smith, Megan. “Libguides: Dewey Decimal Classification: Home.” Home - Dewey Decimal Classification - LibGuides at East Stroudsburg University of PA, esu.libguides.com/dewey#:~:text=Before%20the%20DDC%20was%20invented,similar%20topics%20on%20the%20shelf. Accessed 13 Jan. 2024.?