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| Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash |
I attended a session at WLA in Green Bay in November of last year about the Whitefish Bay's Book Seek classification system for their nonfiction collection presented by Valerie Morris. The gist of the session was the multitude of reasons that the Dewey Decimal System needs to go! This session inspired me to change how our children's nonfiction collection is classified (a work in progress). And, after doing more research into the negative side of the Dewey Decimal System, and its creator, I'm firmly on team Ditch Dewey!
School Library Journal published an article in 2019 titled The Trouble with Dewey, which stated, "Dewey is in many ways an outdated mess. Racist and sexist, it classifies 'women's work' separately from jobs, and African American culture separately from American culture." And, those are only two examples of the problematic nature of continuing to use a system created by a biased creator over 150 years ago.
Is your library still using the Dewey Decimal System?
You can read the School Library Journal Article here: [The Trouble with Dewey. Marrocolla, Elisabeth. School Library Journal. 10/01/2019. https://www.slj.com/story/The-Trouble-with-Dewey-libraries]
For those of you interested in diving further into Dewey himself, I recommend:
Racism in the Dewey Decimal System from Book Riot
ALA Votes to Strip Melvil Dewey's Name from its Top Honor from Publisher's Weekly
Move Over, Melvil! Momentum Grows to Eliminate Bias and Racims in the 145-year-old Dewey Decimal System from School Library Journal.
4 comments:
Can you elaborate on how you are shelving them now? I have been interested and nominally researching this for years. I haven't come up with the method I can see working for all of our library branches. We will need a definite plan in order to get buy in. Has your adult nonfiction been cataloged this way too?
I adapted what Valerie from Whitefish Bay created into what worked for us. It's based loosely on the Metis system. The books are shelved by subject. We have large subjects, like creatures, broken down within them into categories, like mammals. We've worked closely with our Library Resources team to create call numbers and spine labels that make it easy for staff and library users. In the end, we got the most buy in by highlighting how the books are shelved by the way that people look for them. I am happy to send you our system if you're interested in looking at it.
Thank you Katie. Yes, I would love to see your system.
Send me an email, and I can send you what I have. My email address is kaganser@midlibrary.org.
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