1 - A Brief History of the Dewey Decimal Classification

Summary

‘Dewey belongs to all; it escaped from Amherst nearly a century ago. It has crossed oceans and penetrated continents.’ (Joel C. Downing, 1976)

Introduction

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the mid-19th century saw the rise of democracy and expansion of education. The same year the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) was first published, Thomas Edison established his industrial research facility in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was a time of pragmatism and innovation in many fields and there was a widespread desire to increase efficiency and utilize technology to bring prosperity and intellectual development to all.

Libraries began to be seen not merely as storehouses of books but as centers of knowledge dissemination and consequently instruments of social change. Democratized libraries were thrown open to all sections of society. To meet the new challenge and fulfill the expectations of a more aware society, libraries underwent many changes. Open access to the collection was introduced, thus allowing readers to browse freely through stacks of books. This change required more scientific and efficient methods for the cataloging, storage, location and re-shelving of books than had been practiced up to that point in time.

The library classification systems – in fact the methods for arranging books – prevalent till the last quarter of the 19th century are now called ‘fixed location systems’. These are termed so because though items in a collection were gathered into broad subject categories, their location remained fixed on the shelves until the next reclassification of the library. In such systems, items were arranged according to their location number within broad classes. For instance, say that P represented physics, then P3.3.10 would be the tenth book on the third shelf of the third book case for the physics books. Thus, the number a book bore and the location it ended up in were accidental; they did not take into account the internal relationships of physics. This caused many difficulties for a growing library. For instance, when the space allotted to physics was filled, new books had to be placed elsewhere, or a range located elsewhere in the library could be dedicated to physics, or the nearest range occupied by books of some other subject would have to be vacated, which would require giving new numbers to all the books shifted. Any of these solutions broke the subject grouping.