Throwing Dewey Overboard

von Mayrhauser, Heidi.

Parrott, K. & Gattullo, E.  (2013).  Throwing Dewey Overboard.  Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, 11 (3), 3-33.

Length: 6 pages

Notes Summary and Evaluation:  This was an interesting article about a library in Connecticut that got rid of the Dewey Decimal System--and then the amazing results that followed.  I was interested in this topic, as classmates talked about the possibility of this after looking at our core, emphasis, and special collections in presentations three and four.

After reorganizing their picture book and early reader collections by topic (instead of author last name) the circulation went from 18,926 to 121,245 in the first year!  Then they went on to reconsider their older juvenile fiction collection and non-fiction collection.  I went into this article feeling that getting rid of the DDC would work in a small, non-fiction collection.  But for a large non-fiction collection this might be too overwhelming to find a single book, say for a paging list.  This library came up with a "Dewey Hybrid Model" or "Dewey Lite."  This meant that the collection was divided into several broad subject areas.  The DD numbers remained on the spines.  An example of how they moved things around is by putting all animal books together (500s--animals and 600s--pets).

Here are their main subject areas:

• Kids Animals
• Kids Create
• Kids Facts
• Kids Fun
• Kids Poetry
• Kids Self
• Kids Sports
• Kids STEM
• Kids Then & Now

This article also walks you through the entire process and gives lots of tips in case you want to implement something similar.  It also addresses possible problems, the main being outliers of these subject areas.