Down with Dewey 🧾
Down with Dewey
Many people know Melvil Dewey as the famous creator of the Dewey Decimal System, but what many people don't know is how problematic his ways were and how that lead into the problems found within the library categorizing system! Even back in his generation, he was considered very racist (Considering this was in the early 1900's, this already says a lot.) He displayed so many signs of antisemitism, even creating his own club and refusing to let Jewish and Black Americans join. A lot of his behavior around the workplace was also very inappropriate, constantly being accused of sexually harassing other female librarians or people he worked with. He even made inappropriate sexual advances to his daughter-in-law. When I read this, I was so disgusted and shocked. Even though his goal was to get more females employed in libraries, it feels odd to even give him that credit because of all the accusations of sexual misconduct against him. I believe that it was important for the American Library Association (ALA) to strip his name from its top honor because of his history. I will be talking about many of the things he did in his lifetime and to the Dewey Decimal System in this blog post.
To give some examples of how his discrimination got incorporated into making the book-organizing system, let's talk about the Religion section. The 200s section holds all the Religion books, but SIX out of the ten subjects are only for Christianity related topics. That means every other religion or practice of faith isn't even covered until 290. The thousands of religions in the world that have to share the last ten numbers of the section, which is ridiculous and very unreasonable. Religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam have a lot of books, so they end up having a call number with lots of decimals, therefore becoming more difficult to find. (When the call number has a lot of decimal places, they could get off) Whichever religions Dewey decided originated from people of color, got way less space then the religions originating from white people.
This has also happened to the different ethnicity groups. German people get the section 305.82, but 305.895 covers all East and South Asian peoples. All those books would get those three decimals, and some of them may even not get found. These are just a few of the many examples of how Melvil Dewey's racism manifested so much in how he organized the books. He had so much bias when it came to dedicating sections and even though he thought that would be okay, it would later cause so many problems today. I think that even though it would be very difficult to completely re-catalog the whole library system, I think it would be so important to do that because of the racism in the non-fiction section.
In addition to inappropriately advancing towards the women in his workplace, he has publicly said that "women deserved smaller salaries than men, he said, because males, in addition to being capable of the same library work, could also “lift a heavy case, or climb a ladder. … There are many uses for which a stout corduroy is really worth more than the finest silk.”, which is a very misogynist quote.
I am glad that the American Library Association (ALA) said this after listing all his offenses: "Whereas the behavior demonstrated for decades by Dewey does not represent the stated fundamental values of ALA in equity, diversity, and inclusion". I agree that the history behind this whole system is too problematic and that we need to make the system way more inclusive.
Speaking of revamping the book organization system, I am a fan of how some bookstores organize everything. Specifically speaking, I really like sorting books by their genres or categories/subjects. A really important historical figure that was mentioned in these articles was Dorothy Porter. She was a librarian who worked to decolonize the DDC by creating her own system. She said, “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she explained in her oral history. In many “white libraries,” she continued, “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.” I agree with her statement and I found her story to be so inspirational. When she didn't have a very big budget, she began to make connections with different book dealers around the world and when she was at Howard University, she advocated for books about African Heritage on campus. She classified her books by genre and author to highlight the foundational role of Black people in all the subject areas.
I think I would organize the library similar to how Dorothy did it, which is by genre. The categories I would put the books in would be pretty specific since I do not want to put a book in a category where it doesn't belong just because it doesn't have a proper home. Currently, the DDC has ten fixed categories, but I would like to add more to accommodate even more. Most of the changes would be made in the Religion section and
I would make the categories and subcategories like this:
Art & Hobbies
Why: There are so many different forms of art and hobbies out there. It could be really specific, like crochet books, so it would be good to dedicate a whole section to those.
Subcategories: Painting, Sculpting, Drawing, Crafts, Creative Hobbies, Music
Anthropology and Sociology
Why: There are many books on studying humans and everything behind human interaction and different behaviors. It would be good for researchers or people in general who want to learn about other cultures to find books.
Subcategories: World cultures, human behavior, human interaction, race/ethnicity/nationality
Religion and Spirituality
Why: Even though the Dewey decimal system has a religion section, most of it is dedicated to Christianity, but it would be better to dedicate an equal amount to the diverse religions around the world.
Subcategories: Religions by location, religious tradition, spirituality
Linguistics/ Language Books
Why: With more than 7000 languages in the world, I think it's important to highlight all of them and have a lot of books related to history and different writing systems. It's also important to have a lot of books in other languages so that everyone gets a chance to read.
Subcategories: International (by region) languages, grammar, sign languages, Native languages
Law, Business and Economics
Why: I would separate the sociology from the business/ economics books, because I feel like one is about studying things like behavior, and one is about studying things like finance and laws.
Subcategories: Law, criminology, commerce, communications, economics
Science and Mathematics
Why: I would probably keep the science and math sections very similar to the DDC because I didn't find anything that needed to be changed.
Subcategories: Chemistry, life sciences, earth sciences, physics, astronomy, mathematics
Literature
Why: Most of the sections in Literature right now cover only North American or European literature- with the last ten numbers being "other literature", which includes Asian and South American literature.
Subcategories: Poetry, essays, fiction, letters separated by different countries/ continents/ regions,
World History and Geography
Why: Although there are already sections on the history of different continents, it would be good to expand them (not just take up ten numbers) This would also address the racial bias that Dorothy Porter pointed out.
Subcategories: Geography of different countries, history of different countries, the ancient world
Technology
Why: This section needs to be updated with more subcategories because of all the modern technology we have now.
Subcategories: Artificial intelligence, databases, hardware and software
Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs
Why: So many people nowadays publish books about their lives and it would be important to have a section dedicated to them to showcase all their unique stories.
Subcategories: Sports celebrities, musicians, actors/ actresses, political figures, inspirational figures
Sports and other Recreational Activities
Why: In the DDC, this category is combined with Art, even though those are drastically different topics.
Subcategories: Indoor games, outdoor games, aquatic sports, air sports
Issues with coming up with a new system:
- Coming up with a new cataloging system as a whole would take a very long time to finalize and implement in every single library. (Although, a lot of library critics have already pointed out that they would like to switch the library organizing system to something similar to how they do it in bookstores.)
I would use different-colored symbols to represent each category since I think that would make it easier for people to find a book they're looking for just by browsing the shelves.
(Like this image right here)
MLA Citations:
Gooding-Call, Anna. “Racism in the Dewey Decimal System.” Book Riot, 3 Sept. 2021, bookriot.com/racism-in-the-dewey-decimal-system/
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Fantastic entry; detailed and thoughtful analysis. Excellent work :)
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