Melvil Dewey

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Melvil Dewey (December 10, 1851–December 26, 1931) was the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system for library classification.

Dewey was born Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey in Adams Center, New York in the United States. He attended Amherst College, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon. He graduated in 1874 with a bachelor's degree and received a master's degree from Amherst in 1877. It was while working as an assistant librarian at Amherst from 1874 until 1877 that Dewey devised his system of classifying and cataloguing books by decimal numbers.

He moved to Boston where he created and edited Library Journal, which became an influential factor in the development of libraries in America, and in the reform of their administration.

With his friend and fellow librarian Charles Ammi Cutter, he helped found the American Library Association (ALA); both men spoke at the First Annual ALA Conference held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1876.

In 1883 he became librarian of Columbia College, and in the following year founded the Columbia School of Library Economy, the first ever institution organized for the instruction of librarians. This school, which was very successful, was removed to Albany, New York in 1890, where it was reestablished as the New York State Library School under his direction. From 1888 to 1906 he was director of the New York State Library and from 1888 to 1900 was secretary of the University of the State of New York, completely reorganizing the state library and making it one of the most efficient in America as well as establishing the system of state travelling libraries and picture collections. In 1890 he helped to found the first state library association - the New York Library Association (NYLA) - and he was its first president, from 1890-1892.

He was an advocate of the metric system and English language spelling reform and is responsible for, among other things, the "American" spelling of the word Catalog (as opposed to the British Catalogue). He considered changing his own name from Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey to simply Melvil Dui.[1] He also sponsored periodicals on the Ro constructed language, in which the word structure marked its meaning in a hierarchy of categories.

Late in his life Dewey resided in the community of Lake Placid, New York, where he helped found the Lake Placid Club as a health resort. His theories of spelling reform found some local success at Lake Placid: there is an "Adirondac Loj" in the area, and dinner menus of the club featured his spelling reform. A September 1927 menu is headed "Simpler spelin" and features dishes like Hadok, Poted beef with noodls, Parsli or Masht potato, Butr, Steamd rys, Letis, and Ys cream. It also advises guests that "All shud see the butiful after-glo on mountains to the east just befor sunset. Fyn vu from Golfhous porch."

Dewey was an early promoter of winter sports in Lake Placid and was active in arranging the 1932 Winter Olympics there. He also was a founder of the Lake Placid Club Education Foundation in 1922 and the Adirondack Music Festival in 1925, and served as a trustee of the Chautauqua Institution.

In 1926 he established a southern branch of the Lake Placid Club in Florida.

While remembered for his Dewey Decimal System, Dewey's personal views would be considered racist and sexist today. Even in his own day, his career as a public servant, as New York State Librarian, was negatively affected by the anti-Semitic policies of the Lake Placid Club (Wiegand 1996:280; Garrison 1983:42); his role in the ALA was curtailed by his overly familiar attention to women (Wiegand 1996:340).

Dewey married Annie R. Godfrey of Milford, Massachusetts, in 1878. They had one son, Godfrey, born in 1887. Two years after her death in 1922, he married Mrs. Emily McKay Beal. They remained married until his death. He died of a brain hemorrhage in Lake Placid, Florida, on the day after Christmas in 1931.

Dewey is a member of the American Library Association's Hall of Fame.

[edit] External links

• Works by Melvil Dewey at Project Gutenberg
• What's so great about the Dewey Decimal System? - contains biographical information
• New York Times, Melvil Dewey dead in Florida, December 27, 1931.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Garrison, Dee. Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876–1920. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. ISBN 0-299-18114-6.

• Wiegand, Wayne A. Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey. Chicago: American Library Association, 1996. ISBN 0-8389-0680-X.
• Dawe, George Grosvenor. Melvil Dewey, seer: inspirer: doer, 1851-1931. Lake Placid Club, N.Y.: Melvil Dewey Biografy, 1932.