Melvil Dewey, American librarian and inventor of the Dewey decimal book classification system was born at Adams Center, NY. Born Melville Louis Kosuth Dewey (say that three times fast!), he was an advocate of spelling reform, urged use of the metric system and was interested in many other education reforms.
Well, things have changed a bit since Melvil's day. For example: at the library where I work....we have put the ESL materials all together. We don't shelve them in strict call number order. We place them together by type:Course, Tutors, TOEFL, Vocabulary, etc.
People are looking for user friendly classifications...."Psychology", "Self Help", "Writing", etc. We librarians are working to make our collections accessible in every sense of the word.
A woman that I work with has put "series labels" on the mysteries.....Not all of the mysteries are as obvious as Sue Grafton's "A is for...." or Janet Evanovich's "One for the Money", etc. These series labels allow the shelf browser to see what series he or she is looking at and what number in the series he or she is dealing with. I love this!
Leaping, Libertine Librarians thrill at user friendly shelf arrangements!
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