Digging Up Dewey
By Lillian N. Gerhardt, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 9/1/1997
If you'd like to know a lot more about how American library service got the way it is, read Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey by Wayne A. Wiegand (ALA, 1996, $35). Melvil was amazing: he got the American Library Association founded, invented what became Library Journal, and established higher education for librarians. Melvil was awful: he was an active anti-Semite, slippery with money, and (on very little evidence and lots of gossip) an indefatigable harasser of women -- the kissypoo/grab/squeeze/pat type. Melvil's range of interests went awesomely beyond the Dewey Decimal Classification system to include: spelling reform, the development of model (exclusive) recreational communities, and library services for children. Like all the best historians, Wiegand is an excellent storyteller. Melvil Dewey, on many social and educational fronts, comes to life with major strengths and hobbling weaknesses; neither are overlooked nor downplayed.
I read this book with great pleasure before the 1997 ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco. Given the number of times I heard Dewey's name invoked during the conference, I was especially glad I'd read it. ALA's speakers have taken to guessing what Dewey's responses would be to current issues in library science.
For instance, it was declared that Dewey would definitely love all of the promise of electronic information delivery, that he would set about organizing its chaos and resolving the problems presented by the Internet. Not according to Wiegand's evidence. Dig up Dewey, unexposed to the sensibilities of our times, and he'd probably enjoy the equipment; he did, after all, promote typewriters over handwritten catalog cards. However, Dewey might embrace filters to block whatever he disliked or disagreed with on the Internet. He believed in controlling the library material presented to the masses for their spiritual and moral betterment.
Speculation on what the long-dead would do in our world today is bootless. Deciding what they should have done or said in their lifetimes is footling. All we can know is what the record shows. So, when it was asserted in a free-for-all discussion that selection and collection development has been a core professional activity of librarians since Dewey founded the first library school, I had the facts from Wiegand's book: Dewey was no proponent of book selection by front-line librarians, but urged purchases from subject lists compiled and issued by committees of ALA. Nor did he propound content expertise as a goal for librarians. He laid out courses for the mastery of technical and commercial concerns. "Look to your position as a high-grade business one," he said.
One of the lecturers in Dewey's library schools at Columbia College and later, at the State University of New York in Albany, was Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild. She disagreed with Dewey. To counter what she considered his "emphasis on commerce," Fairchild argued that "every librarian should be master of the solid literature of one field, however small," and proceeded to build heavily attended courses and seminars on book selection. Dewey was the boss and resented student and alumni support for Fairchild's view. He "gave Fairchild 'direct charge' of developing a curriculum for library services to children." Thus, while her view of direct responsibility for subject mastery and selection was not silenced, it was ghettoized into courses on work with children. Other early library schools followed Dewey's lead.
We are confronting now -- in the clashes over the outsourcing of materials selection -- one of the longest-running philosophical differences in library service. This scrap of history explains why public library administrators, dazzled by dreams of cost savings if only selection could be contracted out, are so often at odds with their youth services staffs on the importance of time and training in selection as well as a thorough knowledge of materials content.
We may have all gone to the same library schools, but some of us caught Fairchild's vision while others got immunized against it by Dewey's concentration on what she considered "technical minutiae."
Let's hear it for Mary Salome Cutler Fairchild and for Wiegand's concise report of where all this fun began.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
