Betcha didn’t know that the Dewey Decimal
System was invented in 1873 by an Amherst College junior, who was, mostly
likely, a neat freak.
“Melvil Dui” was born as Melville Louis
Kossuth Dewey. In his youth, the lad was obsessed with frugality, efficiency, and
a “passion for order.” He acquired a
lifelong fixation on labor-saving devices and concepts.
There were some weird outcomes. In
thrall to brevity and efficiency, he adopted the name “Melvil Dui.” Yeah, you
get it.
He also persuaded the faculty at
Amherst to adopt his revolutionary system for cataloging, using a numeric
coding system which standardized the classification of books, created standard
categories and could be expanded as needed to accommodate new titles without
disturbing the orderliness of the system. Dewey was a student worker in Amherst’s
library, and he was intensely frustrated by the traditional hodgepodge of
library book classification and storage: a book could be shelved anywhere in a
given library, and would be more or less randomly located in every other
library.
By Dewey’s time, libraries had been
around for several hundred years. Admittedly, in the early days there weren’t
all that many books, but the Dewey Decimal System was long overdue.
I wonder why no one thought of it
before the nerdy kid came along.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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