Let us skip the formalities and get right to the facts. As Fister (2009) declares, “…Dewey is currently the most widely used classification system in the world, employed in 138 countries by over 200,000 libraries” (p. 25). In my own experience, I think at every level in my education I have utilized a library which employed some form of Dewey Decimal System. Even at the elementary school level, in good old St. Stephen School in Pittsburgh, PA we were drilled with the DDC as soon as we could count our hundreds. Assignments consisted of librarians instructing us on the number system, giving us the title of a book and asking us to place it in the correct category, find it and copy a sentence down from a specific page. My story would explain that fact that, “In the United States, 25% of academic libraries and 95% of public and school libraries use the DDC” (Multimedia Tour). Moving forward from that small aside, from the simple fact that the DDC is used in so many different countries means that it has in a sense become its own language (which Melvil Dewey would be very impressed with). From a library that is servicing a small town to a large university, Dewey offers an organizational method that gives patrons the tools to open their minds to a variety of topics.
This further supports the notion that all of these institutions may not use Dewey in the same way, but may structure it according to their own specific purpose. Although Dewey was obsessed with that hierarchy he worked so hard to establish, “His goal was not to become famous but rather to have every library use his system so that libraries would become more cohesive and efficient” (Prescott, 2001, p. 50). In abiding with his wish, perhaps in taking a serious look at how to promote its use and adapt it to our own library is the correct way to utilize a very effective system. The “who” in the field of organizing and distributing information often plays as much of a role as the “what” or “how”.
No comments:
Post a Comment