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Topic: Melvil Dewey

Melvil Dewey, a librarian who helped found the American Library Association, was born on this date in 1851.

Although we doubt most of us have given much thought to Melvil Dewey since leaving grammar school, we also expect many of us instantly recognize his name and his claim to fame: Dewey devised the Dewey Decimal System, the cataloging and classifying method of organizing books on library shelves that preceded (and inspired) the other major system of organization, the Library of Congress classification.

In retrospect, Dewey's system seems obvious: knowledge is organized into ten main classes, and each of those classes is divided into 10 divisions; those 100 divisions each contain 10 sections. But remember that, until Dewey, books in a library were not organized; at best, their location on a shelf was recorded in a librarian's catalog.

In Dewey's system, each book is first categorized by class or category. For example, the category Technology is notated as a 600; the subcategory Agriculture and Related Technologies narrows the broad 600 into the 630s; and specifying Animal Husbandry further refines the classification to 636. That three digit number is followed by a decimal point, and then still-finer nuances of specification come into play. Still with us? 636.089 is translated by Dewey into All Creatures Great and Small, the memoir of Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriot.

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