Melvil Dewey Essay ⋆ Education Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Melvil Dewey devised the Dewey Decimal System, as it came to be called, which is still the primary classification system at most school and public libraries. He also was among the early leaders of the American Library Association and was the first editor of the Library Journal.

Dewey was born in Adams Center, New York. He earned his BA from Amherst College in 1874 and completed his MA there in 1877. During his time at Amherst, he worked in the college library and visited many other libraries to compare their organizational systems and procedures with those in place at Amherst. In 1876, he published a pamphlet titled “A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library.” The system he described is made up of ten main categories that are divided into ten subcategories. Each subcategory then has ten subclasses of its own. This system was almost immediately popularized. Moving to Boston in 1876, Dewey arranged the librarians’ conference in October of that year, which led to the formation of the American Library Association (ALA). Dewey became the new association’s secretary, and later its president and treasurer. That same year, Library Journal began publication, with Dewey as its editor. In 1883, Dewey became the librarian at Columbia College, where he founded the Columbia School of Library Economy in 1887. This was the first library school in the United States. Dewey also advocated use of the metric system and English-language spelling reform.

Although he is credited with opening the library profession to women, his personal views on gender, ethnicity, and race led to professional difficulties in his own time and would be considered sexist and racist today.

Bibliography:

Wiegand, W. A. (1996). Irrepressible reformer: A biography of Melvil Dewey. Chicago: American Library Association.

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