Library Sherpa

Hopefully, rumors of the death of Dewey are greatly exaggerated.  According to this article from the New York Times, a public library in Arizona has ditched the Dewey Decimal System in favor of a “Barnes & Noble style” system of classification.  (Library Sherpa takes a deep breath and counts backwards from ten….)   WHAT?!?!  Have you lost your collective minds, Perry Branch Library in Gilbert, AZ?  Ok, sorry, that wasn’t professional.  Ah-hem.  What we have here is a contribution to the ‘dumbing-down’ of America.  Librarians are not only keepers of books and information, but instructors.  Rather than teach and lead the people how to use Dewey, this library has given up and succumbed to the evil siren song of corporate America.  One of the anti-Dewey comments in the article was that the DDS is outdated and has a Christian-American bias for cataloging.  The pro-Dewey counterpoint was that the system has been revised 22 times to address these issues.  The U.S. Constitution had faults with it as well and that was revised.  But, let’s just scrap that for a more Barnes & Noble friendly version of historic government documents.  (No, Dick Cheney, I’m NOT talking to you.)  I did calm down long enough to try to see this situation from an opposite point of view.  If this change will bring more people into the library, then I suppose it could be a productive thing.  However, I cannot get past the idea of changing what I consider to be a basic fundamental of the library, an organized and proven classification system.  I feel that what this library has done is the start of a slippery slope.  Between the self-checkout counters and the ‘lay-man’ style of book organization, it would conceivably be easier and easier to phase professional librarians out of the library.  This, my friends, would be bad for us all.  Long live Dewey!  Viva la Dewey!

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