Melvil dewey contribution to library science
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Melvil Dewey
Inventor of the Dewey Decimal system
Melville Louis Kossuth "Melvil" Dewey (December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931) was an American librarian and educator who invented the Dewey Decimal system of library classification. He was a founder of the Lake Placid Club, a chief librarian at Columbia University, and a founding member of the American Library Association. Although Dewey's contributions to the modern library are widely recognized, his legacy is marred by his sexual harassment of female colleagues, as well as his racism and antisemitism.
Education and personal life
Dewey was born on December 10, 1851, in Adams Center, New York, the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Greene Dewey. He attended rural schools and determined early on that his destiny was to reform the education of the masses.[1] He briefly attended Alfred University (1870),[2] then Amherst College, where he belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, and from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1874 and a master's degree in 1877.[3]
While still a student, h
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Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator
While most Americans know very little about ALA founder Melvil Dewey (1851–1931), nearly all are familiar with his signature achievement, the Dewey Decimal Classification system, which today governs the arrangement of library books in nearly 150 countries. Surprisingly, this ingenious search engine—the Google of its day—that he first published in 1876 reveals much about the man himself, as it was a direct outgrowth of the inner workings of his own mind.
This native of New York State’s burned-over district never could stop thinking about the number 10. As an adolescent, Dewey fell hard for the metric system, whose “great superiority,” as he wrote in a high school essay, “over all others consists in the fact that all its scales are purely decimal.” Considering 10 a magic number, Dewey was convinced that it was no accident that he had been born on December 10, the same day that the French National Assembly adopted the platinum meter bar back in 1799.
At the Lake Placid Club, the cooperative resort in the Adirondacks that he established in 1895,
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Melvil Dewey
Melville Louis Kossuth (Melvil) Dewey (December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931) was an Americanlibrarian and educator. He invented the Dewey Decimal library classification system.
Early life
[change | change source]Dewey was born on December 10, 1851, in Adams Center, New York. He attended Alfred University in 1870[1] and then Amherst College. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1874 and a master's in 1877.[2]
Career
[change | change source]While still a student, he founded the Library Bureau, a company that sold index-cards and filing-cabinets used in libraries and businesses.[3]
He developed his book classification system based on a decimal numbering system while working in the Amherst library. He published a first edition in 1876.[4]
He was one of the founders of the American Library Association in 1876 and served for many years as editor of the Journal of the American Library Association.[5]
In the 1880's he took a position as librarian at Columbia University Libraries, where he developed one of the
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