Comments on: Are Dewey’s Days Numbered?: Libraries Nationwide Are Ditching the Old Classification System

By: sandra

sandra — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 16:24:06 +0000

Hello,

I empathize with you completely! I fight a continual battle with a small, but vocal group of classroom teachers to keep the books organized by DDS instead of by the reading levels assigned to books in the AR program. Thankfully, my principal also continues to hold high standards for the library so I haven’t had to succumb to the kind of re-organization you describe, yet. We need advocacy and support on this issue, but I can see by the majority of the comments that it is unlikely and we will all probably be forced to re-organize our libraries soon.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:57:10 +0000

My greatest confusion in this conversation is why people are so attached to Dewey. . . most of the argument seems to be, “In my day, we did it this way and so these lazy kids today need to do the same.” Isn’t the idea to make the library, especially as print media are becoming endangered, more accessible? No doubt there are things that work in the Ethical Culture community that would require adaption in others (I don’t particularly care for ‘Making Stuff’ as a moniker) but that doesn’t mean the idea is bad. In schools, the library should be a center of the learning hub and making materials accessible is a big step in that. More importantly, the organization of material says nothing about how it is used by students and teachers. Children can learn to synthesize information into their own conclusion much better if they can access the information in the first place, can’t they? If I can access the information easily within a library, I would consider its organization a success.

By: Adrienne Stark

Adrienne Stark — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:30:39 +0000

I have been a teacher for 27, the last 15 as a junior high librarian. After my first year as a librarian I re-classified my fiction according to genres. Students have really enjoyed being able to browse for the type of fiction they like, rather than spending tons of time on the card catalog trying to find a book that will interest them. Yes, this is definitely a bookstore approach, but it allows students greater independence in looking for books that will interest them. Teachers like it too, particularly when they send students to check out books in a particular genre. Improving the user’s access of materials in the library and promoting more independent selection are the most important aspects of any library shelving system. Genres do that for fiction, even if it takes more work to set them up.

By: Dewey is NOT amused! Was he ever, though? « Library Cartoons, Comics and Drawings

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 21:41:57 +0000

[...] by Victor Juhasz. Originally published on School Library Journal. Like this:LikeBe the first to like [...]

By: Dewey Classification | Bound to Unravel

Dewey Classification | Bound to Unravel — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:06:02 +0000

[...] comparison with the cost of buying the books. While investigating the differences, I came across this article, which I found particularly [...]

By: Dave Chancellor

Dave Chancellor — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:14:58 +0000

At first I thought I was reading a New Age article about space age children in the flower power world of the 25th century.

Zounds.

“Whole word labeling”? “Adventure”? “Child centered”? “Making Stuff”?

Let’s be honest … this is the epitome of ‘dumbing down’. This effort is anti-rational, anti-science, anti-logical and corporate, not scholarly.

Of course, this was done a a private school. Ah, for the luxury of having only the best, brightest and most prosperous of students with which to experiment.

The only upside I see in this experiment is that it will produce more bookstore-friendly consumers out of these children. When they grow-up (ah, the tragedy … they will grow-up. Sigh.) they will know how to work at Barnes & Noble, or how to ask a clerk at Barnes & Noble where to find what they are looking for, or perhaps they will be able to browse more ‘adventurously’ on the Amazon web site.

For the sake of genuine education, critical thinking, science and, indeed, the library profession itself, let’s hope that this kind of experimentation confines itself to the rarefied air of private and selective charter schools.

By: Eileen Whitttle

Eileen Whitttle — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:35:55 +0000

I am an unemployed school librarian. I am getting trained to be a special education teacher. I think asking someone to reclassify the library is overwhelming. I think our profession is slowly disappearing and it is too bad!!!

By: Dewey or Don’t We? | Mary McNamara

Dewey or Don’t We? | Mary McNamara — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 03:42:58 +0000

[...] most are doing a bit of a mix with clearer signage — but it’s encouraging to see that new ideas for organization are being put into practice to keep up with user [...]

By: Sue Giffard

Sue Giffard — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:18:49 +0000

I feel compelled to answer this comment, as I feel that you are insinuating that this work was done with little thought, sloppy execution and a kind of free-for-all chaotic result. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one is walking around our library in the kind of clueless way that you suggest. Our catalog shows call numbers: general category, sub-category and, where applicable, author’s name (for fiction and poetry). In some cases we have more books in a particular sub-category than we would have had under a particular Dewey number; in some cases fewer (ie. our system is more specific than Dewey is); in still others, it’s the same (the sports books are an example of this).
I want to answer the idea that using child logic somehow encourages self-centeredness and entitlement on the part of students. The entire basis of developmentally appropriate education as taught in US schools of education is based on the idea that one teaches students in an age-appropriate way: no one would suggest that teaching advanced math to kindergarten is appropriate or helpful; or teaching Shakespearean tragedy to 2nd graders: the list could go on and on. Teachers spend a great deal of time figuring out the best way to teach so that their students can understand and learn: much of this process is about figuring out how children think so that we can present information and engage in conversation with children where they are. As librarians we do much the same thing when we select books for our libraries, decide which stories to read, how to teach web evaluation or how to compile a bibliography or a host of other things. But for some reason, the way librarians organize their collections has traditionally been seen as being outside of the scope of this conversation. What we are saying is that we think that the way we organize our collections should pass the same kind of tests for developmental appropriateness as the rest of our curriculum and program.
One of the problems is that the logic and structure of Dewey escapes most students. We may think that we are presenting a “system” to students. They don’t necessarily experience it that way. Once we move away from Dewey and work with a topic-based (as opposed to primarily discipline-based) system, with whole language call numbers, the logic of the system becomes clear to the students, and they can see and experience it AS A LOGICAL SYSTEM. This can only help them when they are exposed later to a coded system like Library of Congress or Dewey, or some other system in a special library.
I simply don’t see how self-centeredness or entitlement comes into this picture at all.
My prediction is that our students will come out of our elementary school library confident as library users, using the collection way beyond their curriculum needs, and will proceed to be wide-ranging library users with high expectations of libraries and librarians into high school and beyond.

By: Crystal

Crystal — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:49:11 +0000

I believe that you missed the point the people were making about using the Dewey system. Part of giving them those wings is getting them used to what is out there. Labeling your entire (small) collection so that it is easier for them to find books according to their own form of (child) logic doesn’t really do that. Yes, if you are teaching them to use the catalog and then use the call number to go and find it, that’s great. However the article makes clear that that’s not what’s going on. Kids are wandering around the library and looking under subject categories to find the books they want. I agree that as librarians in school libraries (which I am- elementary school level) our job is to teach them how to help themselves. These librarians just gave them a huge short cut, which is why everyone else who is pro-dewey is so upset. (Also- using code classification is basically the complete opposite of using child logic and general subject categories… so I fail to see how a system that revolves around this kind of thought and minimal librarian involvement is going to do the job in preparing them for the majority of libraries out there.)

By: Crystal

Crystal — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:00:58 +0000

Yes… having Dewey experience does help in college Sandy (and everyone else who naively thinks differently- school is a giant practicum for real life by the way). By then you are used to the idea that codes represent certain subjects and create an order of where to find it in the library. Wandering around looking for letters and where you think things belong is no where even in the same ball park.
Wonderful! We’re going to have job security in the academic and public libraries since we’ll have young children and adults with no clue how to find things. If you are even contemplating converting these types of collections into the same system that is child logic centered (great for training more self centered and entitled individuals running around who think that the world revolves around them- ah!)- FYI larger collections require a more in depth system of classification than the alphabet and a general subject.

By: Sue Giffard

Sue Giffard — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:39:12 +0000

In answer to the question why we didn’t just use BISAC and instead created our own system:
When we looked at the Juvenile version of BISAC it seemed to us that it was basically the adult BISAC cut down for children; that much of the hierarchy in the adult BISAC remained in the children’s version; and that BISAC was completely based on alphabetical order. Re the alphabetical order issue: this was a problem for us because we do not have the space to create islands, or specialized areas where we could mix up the sections. We needed a system which would work in a linear fashion on our shelves. So we needed related topics to be together or close by each other (for example, Science, Nature, Animals, Pets). One can use hierarchy to achieve this effect but that was one thing we were trying to limit as much as possible (for example, putting Nature, Animals and Pets under one giant mega-category). We felt that too much hierarchy was not developmentally appropriate for the youngest children we were serving (4, 5, 6, even 7-year-olds and older). In addition, and very importantly for us, the way that the categories were conceived in BISAC did not come out of children’s thinking, and we very much wanted our system to reflect children’s thinking. These were the major reasons we decided against using BISAC. We began our process by having conversations with children at the same time as having adult conversations about main categories/main classes, order and general principles. This meant that our system is a hybrid of the “categorization thinking” of children of various ages (K-4th Grade) as well as having adult input.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 05:03:25 +0000

In the Night Kitchen would be the ‘booty’ books like No, David!, Bill and Pete, Stop Those Pants, and so many more. The little ones love those, haha.

By: Kelly

Kelly — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 04:59:18 +0000

Thank you! I believe children are teachable. Our patrons are more than 90% EL and my entire collection is English and WAS DDS. Children were taught searching skills and were successful. We have now ‘dumbed it down’ for the children so they may instead find books for use in the Accelerated Reader program. Now I spend way too much time apologizing to children and trying to teach them that our catalog with it’s call numbers is obsolete. They must now instead search the catalog to see what my holdings are, then access the AR Bookfinder to see if the book they’re interested in has an AR quiz (most of mine do, now). They will go to one of the six (!) sections of my library to search through picture books, chapter books and non-fiction to find the book they want. Honestly, this is way too time consuming so they settle for whatever they can find in five minutes. This new ‘more efficient’ system was put into place to speed up the checkout process. In the process I sold my tears and integrity but i kept my job and met shame.

By: Michelle K

Michelle K — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:51:20 +0000

I have one question. Why did this library not just go with BISAC instead of recreating the wheel?

By: Steph Buzzell

Steph Buzzell — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:57:22 +0000

I find it interesting that the majority of this discussion is brought back to the fact that people don’t feel that students will be proficient locaters of research information in a college setting if we all revert to this type of system. Isn’t our job as librarians, to prepare students to be independent when researching and locating information, in any setting? It shouldn’t matter the type of system we are using to catalog, as long as students are taught how to successfully navigate and find any type of information successfully. Our jobs as librarians won’t be for nothing, if we are using a different way of categorizing our books. If you feel that way, then you need to look at what we are expected to teach as a librarian. We are the link between students constantly relying on someone else to show them how to do something or find something to taking students to the level of being able to do and find information independently. We teach students how to be self-sufficient, to persevere. We create lifelong learners. I guarantee students are not going into college unprepared because they didn’t have the Dewey decimal system at their k-12 schools; it is because they weren’t given wings to fly on their own. We can’t be enablers as librarians; we must trust that given the right tools, our students can fly. But it is our job to teach, guide and model what those tools are.

By: Katy

Katy — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 18:53:50 +0000

Thank you for saying this! While I think this new system is clever and use is up, we need to factor in unintended consequences. And you’re right- professors frequently lament that students don’t know how to research at even the most basic level. As you get older, though, Dewey gets more intuitive and you don’t need as much training to figure it out, so I understand tossing it for the elementary years. Nonetheless, we really are watering down education in all facets with the basics we so frequently scrap. I have students who, in middle school, have such poor sentence structure their work is unreadable because we don’t teach grammar anymore. I know that using a dictionary is completely unnecessary with dictionary.com, but students built brain skills by having to develop the tenacity and problem solving strategies it took to meet the objective. We are demanding less and less of them on this front.

By: Muriel H. Teusink

Muriel H. Teusink — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 11:46:15 +0000

In some sense of the word, we have done this several years ago. Zoobooks and Magic School Bus, Reading levels, and now French, Spanish, and German, separated out from the non-fiction Dewey area for ease of patron searches!

By: Deborah Smith

Deborah Smith — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:56:34 +0000

I have a hard time finding what I need in the bookstore because the subject that makes sense to me is not always where the bookstore “catalogers” use. I often have to ask for help. What are “librarians” expected to teach to students in the schools? How many of these “librarians” are actual trained librarians? What happens when a book could go into different categories? Who determines where it goes? Is it consistent every time? Is there a description somewhere of all the different sub-themes that fall into the broad subject? Seems to me the dewey decimal system is just as effective and needs less signage.

By: Tali Balas Kaplan

Tali Balas Kaplan — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 20:14:16 +0000

We actually chose the colors red and blue to provide access for users who might be color blind. There are 4 types of color blindness and by choosing red and blue we ensured that any person who has this impairment would be able to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction. This proved to be a boon when our new principal walked in this year and told us he was color blind!
We’re glad that you’re intrigued, vigorous discussion is much better than fading into obscurity.