How one library pioneer profoundly influenced modern librarianship Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey was born on December

10, 1851 to a poor family who lived in a small town in upper New York state. Keenly interested in simplified spelling, he shortened his first name to Melvil as a young adult, dropped his middle names and, for a short time, even spelled his last name as Dui. Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system when he was 21 and working as a student assistant in the library of Amherst College. His work created a revolution in library science and set in motion a new era of librarianship. Melvil Dewey well deserves the title of Father of Modern Librarianship. Dewey changed librarianship from a vocation to a modern profession. He helped establish the American Library Association (ALA) in 1876; he was its secretary from 1876-1890 and its president for the 1890/1891 and 1892/1893 terms. He also co-founded and edited Library Journal. In addition, Dewey promoted library standards and formed a company to sell library supplies, which eventually became the Library Bureau company of today. A pioneer in library education, Dewey became the librarian of Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York City in 1883, and founded the worlds first library school there in 1887. In 1889, he became director of the New York State Library in Albany, a position he held until 1906 Deweys range of knowledge and work was wide and varied. He pioneered the creation of career opportunities for women. He and his first wife, Annie Dewey, developed the Lake Placid Club, a resort for social, cultural and spiritual enrichment in the Adirondack Mountains. As an aforementioned spelling reformer, Dewey presented some of the early editions of the DDC in simplified spelling; his original introduction in simplified spelling was reprinted in subsequent editions of the DDC through publication of Edition 18 in 1971. Melvil Dewey died after suffering a stroke on December 26, 1931 at age 80. Seven decades after his death, he is still primarily known for the Dewey Decimal Classification, the most widely used library classification scheme in the world. Born in Adams Station, New York, Dewey's early schooling was largely informal and intermittent. He entered Amherst College at the age of eighteen. From there he embarked upon his legendary career in librarianship. He started by comprehensively examining the great libraries of New England. What he found appalled his sense of frugality and efficiency. The predominant practice of most libraries in that era was to base the arrangement upon a book's physical location upon the shelf within a certain range. Thus, books on the same subject were often not adjacent to one another. When a library's holdings outgrew the physical dimensions of the structure, the entire collection had to be renumbered both on the books and in the catalog, a highly inefficient and costly procedure. Dewey's most enduring contribution was "his" idea of decimal notation, numbering the contents of the books, rather than the physical objects. (Dewey actually adapted the process from Mr. W.T. Harris, who had utilized a similar but cruder scheme in the St. Louis Public Library. One facet of Dewey's genius was his proclivity to borrow and improve upon the ideas of others.) This inspiration evolved into his Dewey Decimal System (now DD Classification), first implemented in Amherst College in 1873 and first published (anonymously) in 1876. DDC is currently in its 21st edition, and is the most widely used classification scheme in the world. Dewey is also identified as the force that brought about the Conference of Librarians in Philadelphia in 1876, at which the American Library Association was born. His association with F. Leypoldt and R. R. Bowker launched the Library Journal and ensured its continued publication and dissemination. Dewey the man is often cast in a disparaging light, primarily due to what is interpreted as a lust for power. But Dewey's acquisition of power enabled him to implement his ideas. For nearly 30 years he served concurrently as Secretary of the Board, Treasurer of the Board, and Director of Libraries of the State of New York. This considerable power base was augmented further by his influence within the ALA, of which he was elected President twice during the 1890's. His achievements from the era in which he wielded the most power include establishing a library school at Columbia, laying the groundwork for shared cataloging with LC, and standardizing supplies, tools, methods, and education. Dewey organized the first state chapter of the ALA (NY); it would serve as model for all the other state chapters that followed.

Dewey was eventually undone by the powerful bureaucratic forces which he himself had set in motion. Ultimately he was deposed from his New York "monarchy" in 1906 by his once bitter rival who had since become his boss, A. S. Draper. Dewey spent his final 25 years in virtual seclusion at his home in Lake Placid, New York. Where would we be without Mr. Dewey? At the moment that American librarianship needed a visionary with the force necessary to forge direction from lassitude, Dewey grasped the hammer and pounded order into an unformed ingot. The sparks yet fly from his anvil. Dewey, Melvil (10 Dec. 1851-26 Dec. 1931), educational reformer and librarian, was born in Adams Center, New York, the son of Joel Dewey, a general store owner, and Eliza Greene. As a child, Dewey adopted his parents' strict Republican and Baptist values and by the age of fifteen had defined his larger "destiny" as a "reformer" for the masses. In 1869 his family moved to Oneida, New York, where Dewey attended a local Baptist seminary. The following year he enrolled at Amherst College, where he began working in the college library in 1872. Perceiving a potential for libraries to educate the masses, he thereafter committed his life to improving librarianship. To that interest he added others like spelling and metric reform, all of which were aimed at saving time and eliminating waste. He once calculated that if children learned a simplified phonetic form of spelling and the metric system of weights and measures used by most of the rest of the world, educators could save students at least two years' time that could be better spent reading good books. After Dewey graduated in 1874, Amherst hired him to manage its library and reclassify its collections. He worked there for two years, and in 1876 he published A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloging and Arranging Books and Pamphlets in a Library, better known as the "Dewey Decimal Classification," an innovative scheme that superimposed a system of decimals on a structure of knowledge first outlined by English philosopher Francis Bacon and later modified by American educator William Torrey Harris. In the summer of 1876 Dewey moved to Boston, where he helped found the Spelling Reform Association, the Metric Bureau, and the American Library Association and served each as secretary and author of its constitution; he also served as editor of ALA's new Library Journal for four years. Lacking the capital to accelerate the reforms that he hoped these organizations would bring about, Dewey decided to merge treasuries into a single account to increase the collateral against which he could borrow. He failed, however, to inform the organizations of these unorthodox business practices. When several investors in the private Readers and Writers Economy Company, which Dewey had started in 1879, discovered that he had rolled these funds into company accounts, they obtained a court injunction in 1880 that denied him access to the RWEC treasury until the accounting mess he had created could be cleared up. Forced by the injunction to admit to the organizations what he had done, Dewey lost his credibility with them but not his office as secretary. In 1881 Dewey reached a settlement with RWEC in which he split company assets with investors, and two months later he established the Library Bureau, a library and office supplies company. As the bureau's president he resumed efforts to increase efficiency in library services and to advance spelling and metric reform, and slowly he reworked his way into the good graces of the organizations that he had helped start. In the meantime (in 1878), Dewey had married Annie Godfrey. They were to have one child. In May 1883 Dewey became librarian in chief at Columbia College, where he implemented many of the ideas he had been marketing through the Library Bureau. In five years he turned a collection of 50,000 poorly cataloged, indifferently classified, and infrequently used volumes scattered over nine departments into 100,000 uniformly cataloged and classified volumes located in a central library; at the same time he increased circulation 500 percent. Much of this was accomplished in the face of opposition from faculty and trustees who were angered when, without full authorization, Dewey opened the world's first library school in 1887 and admitted seventeen women to its first, twenty-member class. The consternation that his changes caused at Columbia led him to accept an offer by the regents of the University of the State of New York (USNY) in 1888 to become their secretary and the state librarian. The regents also agreed to let him move his library school to Albany. As secretary, Dewey became instrumental in augmenting the power of the USNY regents in the period between 1889 and 1899, when New York's high school enrollment increased by 250 percent, higher education student enrollment by 182 percent, and higher education faculty by 223 percent. By carefully, often quietly, guiding bills favorable to the regents through the legislature, by using his office to create a statewide lobby for higher education, and by harnessing regent powers to examine and license professionals, Dewey established minimum

standards for high school and college curricula, teachers, and libraries, and eliminated scores of bogus diploma mills. In the process, however, he made many enemies. By the time a movement toward the unification of New York's separately run common school and higher education systems gathered momentum in late 1899, Dewey was accurately perceived as an obstacle and was encouraged to resign as the regents' secretary. His situation was not helped that December, when he was caught using his office to protect the interests of a nephew who ran a New York City proprietary school in violation of its own university charter. While the regents' secretary, Dewey pushed USNY into supporting an education extension system that he would be able to control through New York's public libraries. He hoped to make coursework prepared by USNY instructors available at public libraries so that the state's citizens could accumulate enough credits to qualify for a USNY degree. As state librarian, Dewey attempted to create an environment favorable to this system by organizing the New York Library Association; setting up extension sites in public libraries around the state; creating departments within the state library for facilitating interlibrary loans; publishing bibliographies of "best" books; and establishing a traveling library system that became a model for the rest of the country. In addition, he convinced the legislature in 1892 to create a book fund to which public libraries could apply for matching grants if their collections passed inspection by a state library employee. During Dewey's tenure in Albany, the state library's collections had grown by 1905 to 500,000 volumes, making it the fifth largest library in the country. In addition, his library school had become a model for others opening across the country. Although his metric and spelling reform efforts languished in the 1890s, he did become ALA president in 1892-1893, during which time he organized a highly successful conference for the Chicago World's Fair at which ALA exhibited a "model library" whose contents were later published as a bibliographic guide for all American small public libraries. Dewey's Library Bureau weathered financial difficulties in the 1880s but by 1900 had tapped into lucrative markets with a card-index system that greatly reduced record-keeping costs, especially for banks and insurance companies. While Dewey wanted to subordinate the activities of the bureau to his own less profitable reform interests, his business partners were ultimately able to wrest control from him in 1901 when he sought capital for a new venture, the Lake Placid Club in upstate New York. In 1894 Dewey and his wife had established the Lake Placid Club, an exclusive rest and recreation facility in the Adirondacks. Its clientele typically included social workers, librarians, and teachers at all levels of education. In 1896 the Deweys formed a company that owned and improved the land; members of the club were permitted to use its facilities for a fee. From the beginning, however, the club admitted no one against whom any member objected, and, as a result, all Jews, ethnic minorities, and consumptives were barred. In January 1905 several prominent New York Jews publicly called for Dewey's dismissal as state librarian because of the club's exclusionary practices. Under pressure, Dewey resigned later that year. The incident also served as a catalyst for several library school alumnae who were angered by Dewey's earlier unsuccessful efforts to move the library school from Albany and by reports that Dewey had sexually harassed several ALA women in public over the years. In 1906 they forced him out of active participation in ALA. After Dewey moved permanently to Lake Placid, he continued the club's restrictive membership practices and worked hard to improve the club's resources and its parent company. What started as a five-acre endeavor with a few out-buildings surrounding a central clubhouse in 1894 had grown by 1925 into a 10,000-acre complex with scores of buildings, several large clubhouses, a concert hall, five golf courses, and twenty-one tennis courts. Over the years Dewey also cultivated winter sports at the club; by 1930 they had become so popular that the village of Lake Placid was chosen to host the 1932 Winter Olympics. In 1922 Dewey turned over all his assets to a Lake Placid Club Education Foundation he had set up to carry on such reform causes as metric conversion and simplified spelling after his death. That same year his wife died, and in 1924 he married Emily Beal; they had no children. In 1926 he began to spend winters in Florida, and by the summer of 1927 opened a second club there that was characterized by the same exclusionary rules as its northern sister. His efforts to make the Florida Club a success were ultimately defeated by the onset of the Great Depression. Dewey left a substantial legacy, for good and for ill. His decimal system evolved into a familiar organizing system for controlling library collections across the world, and his efforts to identify the best books evolved into a system of published bibliographic guides, like Booklist, Public Library Catalog, and Fiction Catalog, all serials that

grew out of Dewey's 1893 ALA "model library." At the same time, however, his system imposed his perspective of the structure of knowledge on these collections, the arrangement of which mirrored the narrow priorities of the communities from which he and other librarians came. While his efforts as regents' secretary transformed USNY into a powerful organization that substantially improved the quality of New York's educational system, his successes in centralizing and standardizing controls had a homogenizing influence on curricula that undervalued and often ignored the needs of diverse cultures. Finally, his efforts at Lake Placid accelerated the development of the Adirondack resort and tourist industry, but his exclusionary practices perpetuated and amplified the region's reputation for racism. Dewey died at his Florida Club in Lake Placid, Florida. Bibliography Dewey's diaries and papers are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room at Columbia University's Butler Library. See also George Grosvenor Dawe, Melvil Dewey: Seer, Inspirer, Doer, 1851-1931 (1932), Fremont Rider, Melvil Dewey (1944), and Sarah Vann, ed., Melvil Dewey: His Enduring Presence in Librarianship (1978). Dewey, Melvil, 18511931, American library pioneer, originator of the Dewey decimal system, b. Adams Center, N.Y., grad. Amherst (B.A., 1874; M.A., 1877). A man of originality and of enormous energy, Dewey played an important role in the early days of library organization in the United States. He became acting librarian of Amherst in 1874, and there he evolved his system of classification, using numbers from 000 to 999 to cover the general fields of knowledge and designating more specific subjects by the use of decimal points. From 1883 to 1889 he was librarian of Columbia College where he established the first library training school (now defunct). As librarian (18891906) at the New York State Library at Albany he founded another important library school. His interests extended from spelling reform to organizing the Lake Placid Club, a resort in the Adirondacks. Dewey is credited with the invention of the vertical office file. He was a founder of the American Library Association, the New York State Library Association, and the Library Journal. The 20th edition of his Dewey Decimal Classification and Relative Index (1876) was published in 1989. While working as a librarian at Amherst College, Melvil Dewey developed a system of book classification using numbers from 000-999, dividing nonfiction books into 10 broad categories. By the time of his death, the system was being used in over 96% of all American libraries. Dewey helped found the American Library Association and is credited with creating the world's first library science curriculum. a system of classifying books and other works into ten main classes of knowledge with further subdivision in these classes by use of the numbers of a decimal system: devised by Melvil Dewey, published in 1876, and used in many libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere. Melville Louis Kossuth (Melvil) Dewey (December 10, 1851 December 26, 1931) was an American librarian and educator, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, and a founder of the Lake Placid Club. Dewey was born in Adams Center, New York, the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Greene Dewey. He attended rural schools and determined early that his destiny was to be a reformer in educating the masses. At Amherst College he belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, earning a bachelor's degree in 1874 and a master's in 1877. While still a student, he founded the Library Bureau which sold high quality index cards and filing cabinets, and established the standard dimensions for catalog cards.[1] As a young adult he advocated spelling reform; he changed his name from the usual "Melville" to "Melvil", without redundant letters, and for a time changed his surname to "Dui".[2] From 1883 to 1888 he was chief librarian at Columbia University, from 1888 to 1906 director of the New York State Library, and from 1888 to 1900 secretary and executive officer of the University of the State of New York. In 1895 Dewey founded the Lake Placid Club with his wife Annie. He and his son Godfrey had been active in arranging the Winter Olympics which took place at Lake Placidhe was chairman of the New York State Winter Olympics Committee. In 1926 he went to1 Florida to establish a new branch of the Lake Placid Club. He died in Lake Placid, Florida.[3] Even Dewey's friends found his personality difficult, and he early in life established a pattern of making powerful enemies.[4] As one biographer put it, "Although he did not lack friends, they were weary of coming to his defense, so endless a process it had become.[5] He was removed from his position as New York State Librarian during a controversy over policies he had instituted at the Lake Placid Club restricting membership based on race and

religion.[6] Another biography refers to Dewey's "old nemesisa persistent inability to control himself around women" as an ongoing cause of trouble on the job.[7] Dewey had been married to Annie R. Godfrey, and then to Emily McKay Beal.[3] He was a member of the American Library Association's Hall of Fame. Dewey was a pioneer of American librarianship[8] and an influential factor in the development of libraries in America in the beginning of the 20th century.[9] He is best known for the decimal classification system that is used in most public and school libraries. But the decimal system was just one of a long list of innovations. Among them was the idea of the state library as controller of school and public library services within a state.[10] Dewey is also known for the creation of hanging vertical files, which were first introduced at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.[11] In Boston, Massachusetts, he founded the Library Bureau, a private company "for the definite purpose of furnishing libraries with equipment and supplies of unvarying correctness and reliability."[12] mmediately after receiving his undergraduate degree he was hired to manage Amherst's library and reclassify its collections. Dewey worked out a new scheme that superimposed a system of decimal numbers on a structure of knowledge first outlined by Sir Francis Bacon.[13] Dewey copyrighted the system in 1876. This system has proved to be enormously influential; though many American libraries have since adopted the classification scheme of the Library of Congress, Dewey's system remains in widespread use. In 1877 Dewey moved to Boston, where he founded and became editor of The Library Journal, which became an influential factor in the development of libraries in America, and in the reform of their administration. He was also one of the founders of the American Library Association, of which he was secretary from 1876 to 1891, and president in 1891 and 1893.[9] In 1883 Dewey became librarian of Columbia College, and in the following year founded there the School of Library Economy, the first institution for the instruction of librarians ever organized. The proposal to establish the school was approved by the college's Board of Trustees on 5 May 1884.[14] After a period of preparation, the school was officially opened on 5 January 1887, with an enrollment of 20 studentsthree men and 17 women. Women were admitted to the program at Dewey's insistence and against the wishes of the college's Regents.[15] Although the school had a promising start, Dewey's conflicts with the university officials, in particular over the issue of the presence of women, led to its future being cast in doubt, and by 1888 it was apparent that Columbia intended to close it.[16] However, at that point, Dewey, upon accepting a position with the New York State Library in Albany, successfully secured the agreement of its Regents to have the school transferred there. The formal transfer was accomplished in 1889,[17] and the school, which was ultimately very successful, was re-established in Albany as the New York State Library School under Dewey's direction.[9] (The school returned to Columbia's Manhattan campus in 1926.[18]) During the period from 1888 to 1906 Dewey was also director of the New York State Library, and until 1900 he was secretary of the University of the State of New York as well. In that function he completely reorganized the state library, making it one of the most efficient in America, as well as established the system of state travelling libraries and picture collections. In 1885, he founded the New York Library Club there.[12] As an enthusiastic supporter of the metric system, Dewey established the American Metric Bureau.[19] Dewey also served once again as its secretary.[20] Late in his life Dewey helped found the Lake Placid Club as a health resort. His theories of spelling reform (to which end he founded the Spelling Reform Association in 1886)[12] 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. Under his leadership the Northwood School (Lake Placid, New York) prospered. He was also a founder of 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. Dewey was the proponent of Lake Stearns in Florida formally changing its name to Lake Placid, Florida.