Library Research Skills
Classification System
Imagine you were starting a library and you had a few thousand books, magazines and other materials. How would you organize all those sources so people could easily find things? What if your collection grew to a few million items? Could your collection logically adapt and expand?
Libraries attempt to organize and shelve books about the same subject matter together. This may sound simple and rather straightforward; however, if you stop and think for a moment you will realize that most books are about more than one idea or subject. Most books cover a number of different subjects and some books cover two or three subjects in equal depth. But when it comes to placing the book on the shelf the librarian must choose one of the subjects and classify the book under that subject. Whatever decision the librarian makes will have implications for the person seeking the information.
The classification system used in the majority of public libraries, including the Wexford public library service, to organize books on library shelves is the Dewey Decimal Classification System. The system organizes knowledge into subject categories and allows libraries to shelve similar books together. Dewey is used mostly by public libraries and small academic libraries.
Dewey Decimal Classification System
Melvil Dewey designed the Dewey Decimal Classification System in 1876. Dewey was a librarian who worked in Boston and New York. He was very interested in creating efficient ways to organize knowledge and make it accessible to the public. Prior to Dewey's time there were few public libraries, and patrons were not allowed to go into the book stacks to look for their own books.
Books had to be paged for the patron by a library staff person (library page) who knew where things were located. Most academic libraries at the time were little more than warehouses. Melvil Dewey worked to change this situation. By developing a uniform way to classify knowledge, Dewey provided libraries with a way to systematize their work. By working to get all libraries to adopt his system Dewey hoped to provide uniform access to knowledge for all library patrons. Dewey argued that if all libraries adopted the Decimal Classification System, a library patron could go into any library in the country and expect the books to be arranged in a similar uniform manner.
Adoption of the Dewey. Decimal Classification System also promoted opening up the book stacks to users because they could now understand how the books were arranged.
The Dewey Decimal Classification System is currently in its 21st edition. As new knowledge and disciplines come into existence, new subject categories have to be created in the system. Sometimes new subject disciplines must be forced to fit into older categories. Remember, the Dewey system was first designed in 1876, long before computers, motorways, nuclear power, the space program and the television. Each edition of the Dewey Decimal System must retain as much of the original structure as possible. If a new edition of the Dewey Decimal System changed too much it would mean that every library using the system would have to re-catalogue its entire collection-and no library has the financial or human resources to accomplish such a task.
Each subdivision classifies knowledge into more specific units.
The Dewey Decimal Classification System divides all the world's knowledge into ten broad categories. Dewey based his subject arrangement of knowledge on the western academic model. As a result, the Dewey Decimal Classification System has a western worldview built into the very system itself. This western bias has led to problems in the classification of knowledge from non-western cultures.
The first division of the Dewey Decimal Classification System is referred to as the First Summary, or the Ten Main Classes. The First Summary is further broken down into narrower subdivisions, referred to as the Second Summary. The Second Summary breaks down further, and so on and so on.
Adapted and Modified (5th December 2005) from a tutorial, originally created and written by Thomas W. Eland, Librarian/Instructor at Minneapolis Community & Technical College. Original document available at http://www.pals.msus.edu Last updated: December 14, 2000.