Dewey Decimal Classification
October 07, 2006
Except for general fiction books labeled with the letter F or biographies labeled with the letter B, most public and small school libraries -- including Marais des Cygnes Valley -- shelve their books according to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.
| 00-99 General Works | 500 Natural Science, Mathematics |
| 100 Philosophy, Psychology | 600 Technology and Applied Sciences |
| 200 Religion | 700 The Arts |
| 300 Social Sciences | 800 Literature |
| 400 Language | 900 Geography, History |
This organizational system was developed by Melvil Dewey, who was born Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, on December 10, 1851, in Adams Center, New York. As a young man, Dewey had a passion for organizational and learning. It is said that as a youngster he not only catalogued his mother's pantry to achieve better efficiency, but he also taught himself the craft of shoemaking in order to earn money.
When Dewey had saved enough from his trade, he bought what he considered to be his most essential book, an unabridged dictionary, which he reportedly consulted almost daily. Later he taught the content of this book to school children for a wage of $1.50 a day. His own educational pursuits eventually led him to Amherst College in Massachusetts, where as a student library assistant, he became obsessed with determining an efficient way to catalog and shelve the books in the college library collection.
In 1874 Dewey graduated from Amherst, and by 1876 the first edition of his classification scheme was anonymously published, under the title "A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library." By 1885, this 44-page manuscript was revised and enlarged as a second edition, this time carry Dewey's name as the author. Today, libraries are using the twenty-second edition (DDC22), which was published in 2003.
