Meet+Melville+Dewey

Activity #1: Meet Melville Dewey
Follow along as you hear about Mr. Dewey, himself.

Your challenge: find the answers to these big questions as you listen.
 * 1) What is the name of the system that Dewey invented to organize nonfiction books?
 * 2) When was Melville born and where?
 * 3) What was Melville good at doing as a child?
 * 4) When Mr. Dewey worked in a library curing his college years, what frustrated him about how library books were arranged?
 * 5) Why does Melvil Dewey deserve to be considered the father of modern librarianship?

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**Melvil Dewey and the Dewey Decimal Classification System**

 * As found at http://www.homeschoollearning.com/units/unit_09-10-01.shtml

If it weren't for Melvil Dewey, finding the books you want in the library might be as frustrating as looking for a needle in a haystack. Dewey invented a system of grouping books of similar subjects together, classified by numbers. His invention, called the Dewey Decimal System, brought much-needed order to libraries.

Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, the youngest of five children, was born on December 10, 1851, in a small town in northern New York. Later he shortened his first name to Melvil, dropped his middle names and, for a short time, even spelled his last name as Dui.

As a child, Dewey loved to organize and sort things and also had a talent for mathematics. He attended Amherst College where he worked in the library to help pay for his education. Dewey was dismayed at the way books were arranged. Arrangements varied from library to library but in all cases, users had to look in many places to find books on the same subject. Melvil worked towards improving library classification systems. Combining his zeal for math and his orderliness, he invented the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) System when he was twenty-one, working as a student assistant in the Amherst College Library. Upon graduation, he became a librarian at the college.

Before Dewey developed his classification system there was no uniform system used in libraries. This irked Dewey, a proponent of order and simplicity. He developed a way to classify books that would work for all libraries. Dewey devised a system of Arabic numbers and decimals to categorize books according to subject. He received permission from Amherst to apply his new system to the college library. Amherst published his system in a pamphlet entitled "A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library" which is now in its 21st edition and has expanded to fill four large volumes.

Dewey's work created a revolution in library science and set in motion a new era of librarianship. He even went on in life to establish the American Library Association (ALA) in 1876. Melvil Dewey well deserves to be considered the father of modern librarianship.**

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