F*ck the Dewey Decimal System
The guy who created it was a piece of shit
The Dewey Decimal Classification System is the most popular book organization system in the world. The guy who created it, Melvil Dewey, was a bigoted piece of shit and his stupid fucking system reflects that.
Gotta love librarians. As a group, they approach their profession with more enthusiasm than anyone I have yet to meet. Saved my ass while doing my master’s in history, helping me find shit I never could have located on my own. It’s like they approach your research needs as a puzzle to be solved, and they love puzzles.
Egyptians were using a decimal system five thousand years ago; most likely Base-10 was Based-On the fact that we have ten fingers yes thumbs count as fingers guess which finger I’m holding up right now. Born in 1851, Dewey was an American librarian who started creating his decimal-based classification system for books in the 1870s. The system he developed had ten main classes, with 000-099 being for “General Works” and going up to 900-999 for “History, Geography, and Biography,” and a bunch of other shit in between.
Each class had ten divisions. As an example, the 500 class, Natural Science, was broken down into Math, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry etc. And each division had ten sections, like Geography being further broken down by region.
The system allowed people to browse library stacks, doing their own research, whereas before most peasants weren’t allowed such access, and books had fixed positions in libraries that only the librarians knew. Dewey’s system was slowly adopted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Okay let’s get to why Melvil was a piece of shit, and how his book classification system reflects his shitty attitudes, and how that system continues to marginalize people to this day.
First off, the fucker was a serial sexual harasser. He was super touchy-feely with his female subordinates who definitely did not consent to that shit, and despite constantly being told just fucking stop he did not fucking stop. Of course, those sexist beliefs permeated the system he created, with classifications for all kinds of stuff about men, but much less for women.
It gets much worse.
He was a racist and antisemitic motherfucker. He founded the Lake Placid Club and wrote the policy outlining no Jews or Black people or other minorities. Fucker even bought the land adjacent to the club because he feared Jews might buy it. And yeah, that shit permeated the system he created. He outlined myriad categories for varieties of white people, and lumped everyone else into just a couple of categories. For a long time, if you want to find the work of a Black author, it could only be found under the categories “Colonization,” or “Slavery.” Of course, the entire system is Eurocentric as fuck, and big into Protestantism. Christianity gets the lion’s share of the religion category, with everything else crammed into far fewer categories.
What about LGBTQ+ categorization? In 1932 it was categorized under “Abnormal Psychology.” In 1989 this was changed to “Social Problems” and what the fuck that’s not any better. Now, it is in the much-improved category “Sexual Orientation, Transgenderism, Intersexuality,” and that is an improvement. BUT! This category is listed in between prostitution and child trafficking on one side, and fetishes / BDSM is on the other side. That’s fucked up.
I learned about what a despicable fucknut Dewey was during a conversation with Banff Library director Sarah McCormack. The Dewey Decimal Classification System is pervasive; it is still used by most libraries around the world. But Sarah said fuck that jackwagon and his bigoted system too (paraphrased). The Banff Library switched to the BISAC system in 2015, which stands for Book Industry Standards and Communications. It is more geared toward bookstores, but McCormack sees it as “more flexible, easier to update, and more progressive and accessible.”
“You can work within this fundamentally flawed system,” McCormack said of Dewey classification, “Or you can dump it and switch to something that allows us to have the freedom to move with the times and reflect our values and the values of our community.”
Well fucking said.
Get my book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN in bookstores, or a library, or at that link. Makes a cool gift.
And don’t forget to
I love this! I was an academic librarian for 40 years before retiring in 2014. In the US (maybe Canada, too?) most academic libraries use the Library of. Congress classification system and most public and school libraries use the Dewey Decimal System. In library school, I loved learning to catalog in the Dewey system because it was like doing puzzles. You could make a number for anything, and we were given titles like "How to Paint Bullfighting Scenes" to create a call number for. Library of Congress system is must more complex, but allows for larger collections with a greater variety of subjects.
Subject headings are being updated all the time to reflect changes in society, but it can move slowly. I remember when "human rights" had to be assigned "civil rights" because "human rights" was not yet a heading.
There are radical catalogers whose life's work is to remedy this sort of racism and even just dated terminology. Some of them are famous and write books and articles! "Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front" by K. R. Roberto is a good one!
I was just explaining the Dewey Decimal System to my middle schooler as he needed to find some books for a school project. I pointed out to him how biased the Religion category is towards Christianity. I will make sure to point out the LGBTQ+ bias and the racism as well. Thank you for this article.