A Brief Word about the Dewey Decimal System

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August 29, 2013 by ethelfritha

I don’t like it.

Me and Dewey go way back, so it’s not just some random crybaby being like, “boo hoo hoo, it’s too confusing for little ol’ me.” It’s a rational adult with experience in the library sciences who then went, ‘boo hoo hoo, it’s too confusing for little ol’ me.” Because seriously.

When I was growing up, I spent every second I could wrangle at the library. The second I was old enough, I applied for their summer volunteer program and worked there every summer until I graduated from high school. Our duties mainly consisted in sitting for hours behind the summer reading club desk and shelving and re-shelving and RE-shelving the thousands of picture books that got ripped off the shelves every day. But to the oldest and most trusted volunteers went the most interesting and coveted job of all: shelving the adult books.

As you might imagine, when it comes to how most kids want to spend their summer, “giving hours of unpaid labor to the local library” does not rate high on their list. By the time I was heading into my senior year of high school, not that many people had been there as long as I had. And yet the librarians still had not given me that coveted task. Not even in the fiction section. And it was all because in the two days of training at the beginning of the summer, it took me approximately 8,950 years to shelve the smattering of non-fiction books they provided for training purposes. There I was, 17 years old, painstakingly determining that yes, 070.65 came BEFORE 701.98. I always got it right in the end and the librarians were very kind. But I noticed they never let me shelve the adult books. Probably because they wanted the task done sometime in the next century.

In college I landed a job in the library, which was generally considered the cushiest of the work-study positions. At Thomas Aquinas College, EVERY book was shelved by Dewey. EVEN THE FICTION BOOKS, WHICH SHOULD NEVER EVER HAPPEN. In this setting, I had no choice but to get good at it, lest I lose my position and be cast into the kitchen with the pot-scrubbers and onion-choppers. It was here that I got a basic gist of how the system operated, which subjects belonged to which number set. And all the while I thought, who the @#$! came up with this stupid system?

The genius who came up with it was Melvil Dewey, who was so obsessed with efficiency that he considered changing his name to “Dui.” So that’s who we are dealing with here. On paper it sounds good: books are divided by subject matter or field of study, so that science and mathematics is assigned the number 500. As the subject matter gets more specific, so does the number, so that geometry is 516, metric geometry is 516.3, and so on.

That’s great, except that I’m not totally sure Dewey (or “Dui”) ever anticipated the absolute EXPLOSION of information that came with widespread literacy and the advent of the interwebz; there’s no way he could have ever predicted the existence of, say, satirical books about the year 2000. And so the Dewey Decimal Committee (because of course there is one), or, what’s more likely, the head librarian at each individual library, has to take a stab as to where these highly-specific books should go. Which is why you’ll get a memoir from a chef in with the cookbooks and another memoir from a chef in with the biographies, and a hell of a lot of interesting books get left to molder in an obscure range of the Dewey Decimal Classification because no one’s ever thought to look there for something pleasant to read.

Is there a better way to do it? Well, I don’t know. The Library of Congress and most academic libraries use a modified version of the Cutter system, devised by Charles Cutter around the same time as Dewey. In the LoC version of things, subjects are assigned a letter, rather than a number range, followed by an alphanumeric code (the “cutter number”) involving the author’s last name and the first letter of the book’s title. Many libraries a mix of Cutter and Dewey numbers in an attempt to close the organizational gaps left by the DDC, which is just a barrel of laughs for the librarian in charge of printing out labels, let me tell you.

On the other hand, bookstores get by just fine without any structured classification system, though to be fair a bookstore doesn’t have to allow for every single possible book that might someday be on the shelves the way a library does. In fact, here’s  something I bet you didn’t know: the DDC is actually copyrighted by the Online Computer Library Center of Dublin, Ohio, which oversees its use and will sue the shit out of any bookstore that tries to organize its inventory that way. So there’s that.

In conclusion, what was I talking about? Oh right. If the books I read don’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason, blame Dui.