Save Dewey

One of the cornerstones of American culture — a tradition unrivaled by most accounts — is under attack.
That’s right — I’m talking about the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
Old Melvil must be spinning in his grave.
Citing a “Customers First” movement to simplify life for its patrons, Perl Mack Library, nestled away in the Sherrelwood neighborhood of northwestern Denver, is ditching the standby method for hunting down what you want in favor of a “word-based cataloging system.”
The need for this new way, compared to how books might be organized in a retail store, completely escapes me.
Are there enough people who didn’t pay attention in elementary school during library orientation to justify the abandonment of the closest we’ll ever get to a perfect method for organizing books by category, discipline, author and more?
Let’s ignore the fact that every library worth its salt not only lists the Dewey decimal range at the beginning of each row of books, but it also gives hints as to what one might find. Germanic languages? You want 033. Metaphysics? That’s 110. Looking for Ephemerides? They’re still collecting dust over in 528.
My favorite section as a youngster? They used to keep the Hunter S. Thompson over in 813 (American fiction), but nowadays it’s stored in 070.92 (News media, journalism and publishing).
And don’t tell me there’s no room for growth! 040 to 049 is still unassigned, as are dozens of other numerical spots within the system.
This is a uniquely and profoundly simple system — flexible, nearly limitless and able to take anything you or I could possibly know and codify its place in this world.