How Dewey find a Book?

By: Michele, Children's Librarian

In the United States, 95 percent of all public and K-12 school libraries, 25 percent of college and university libraries and 20 percent of special libraries use the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) System. More than 200,000 libraries worldwide in 135 countries count on the DDC to keep their collections organized so that their users can easily locate the resources they need. DDC has been translated into more than 30 languages. What this means for the library user is that anywhere they visit a library, South Bend, Indiana or Brigham City, Utah, you know how to find what you are looking for.


For years librarians have used the classic Dewey Decimal System to assign a book to a location on the library shelf. That may be changing however. The newest trend for libraries is to follow the way book stores organize their shelves, by catergory or genre.



On one hand the dewey decimal system places all the books about bears in the mammal section and then in a subsection about bears. Which can be broken down into additional subsections on different types of bears, i.e. polar bears, black bears, grizzly bears.



But if you go to the Barnes & Noble nearest you, you may see that they put all the animal books together. They put all the books about home decoration and D.I.Y. projects together, even gardening books are placed along side the titles about home projects. From a browsing point of view this makes it easy to find books on similar interests. If you like mysteries, you may find at a local book store that all of your favorite authors are together. But at a library you will find that those authors may be shelved alphabetically with authors that write romance, science fiction and horror.


At the Brigham City Library we make a few compromises to the dewey system, we have a mystery corner, a section for Newbery winners and our adult paperbacks are divided into genres. This makes looking for your favorite type of book easy, if you know where to look.


Non-fiction is still shelved upstairs using the dewey system. The Dewey Decimal system was created by Melvil Dewey. His goal was to organize information into ten major subject areas. He gave each subject a number.


000-099 Generalities: encyclopedias, periodicals, newspapers,TV, Internet, Macintosh, Network Troubleshooting
100-199 Philosophy: esthetics, psychology, logic, ethics
200-299 Religion: Bible, theology, church doctrine
300-399 Social Sciences: sociology, economics, law, education, shopping
400-499 Language: dictionaries, grammars, readers, all languages
500-599 Pure Sciences: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry
600-699 Technology: engineering, agriculture, aircraft, pets, business
700-799 The Arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, sports
800-899 Literature: poetry, drama and essays in all language
900-999 Geography & History: general geography, travel, histories of all countries and ages



Biography: Biography is arranged by the last name of the person the book is written about. Example: George Washington is 921 Was
Fiction: Grouped by author's last name. Example: Hemingway is F HEM

For an animated tour on how the Dewey Decimal System works go to: http://www.oclc.org/dewey/resources/tour/ and click on the multimedia tour hyperlink.

So okay, I don't think that anyone finds the Dewey Decimal System interesting except us librarians, but I do think that if you learn the system you will find what you need when you visit the library. As for the future of Dewey, I don't think that something this popular and widespread will go away any time soon. Save yourself some time and DO THE DEWEY!