I thought it was past time to investigate the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, especially after learning that it wasn’t created by John Dewey—whom I greatly admire and whose ideal of free public education to develop a democratic citizenry is currently being dismantled. No, the other Dewey. Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey (1851–1931) devised the system when he was a librarian at Amherst College. The classification scheme was copyrighted in 1876, more than two decades before Herbert Putnam invented the Library of Congress catalog structure. Dewey has a mixed reputation. On the plus side, he co-founded the American Library Association, established the Library Journal, and was an influential figure in the new field of library science. He also liked to futz with language. He changed the spelling of his name from Melville to Melvil, and came up with a “reformed” orthography. To wit, the items on a proposed menu: Hadok, Poted beef with noodls, Parsli or Masht potato, Butr, Steamd rys, Letis, and Ys cream. He was a strong supporter of the metric system. And, he invented hanging files, introducing them at the Columbia Exposition in 1893. On the down side, he was racist, antisemitic, and a serial sexual harasser. Even by nineteenth-century standards his bigotry stood out. His colleagues remarked on these problems and he was forced to step down as New York State Librarian for his discriminatory policies. In 2019, the American Library Association removed his name from the top honor awarded by the profession. There are numerous articles about Dewey online, including one in Smithsonian Magazine, which describes Dewey’s seamier side; a straightforward item on the OCLC website (Online Computer Library Center); and of course Wikipedia. While this is all fascinating, it still doesn’t get to the heart of my own questions. For example, why is Tuesdays With Morrie sandwiched between Peterson’s Guide to Four-Year Colleges and the College Board’s Book of Majors. This juxtaposition was so disturbing to me that I took Tuesdays With Morrie to one of the librarians to verify that the call number was correct. It was. In the Dewey system 378 includes colleges, grants, higher education, and universities. So, does the 378 number assigned to Morrie compare the life and death decisions regarding ALS with those involved in college admissions? Is it higher education in a metaphysical sense? This, among other classification anomalies, remains a mystery. Dangers of Health Foodwill definitely be addressed in a future post. Comments are closed.
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Author Rebecca Moore is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at San Diego State University. She is currently Reviews Editor for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions and Co-Director of The Jonestown Institute. Archives
December 2021
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