Librarians Weigh in on Arizona's Dewey–Less Library

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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 6/6/2007

Residents of Gilbert, AZ, might think they're at Barnes & Noble rather than the Perry Branch Library when it opens later this month. That's because it's one of the first in the nation to get rid of the Dewey decimal system.

Instead, the library's entire 31,000-item collection will be shelved by topic and alphabetized by an author's last name, the same way it's done at bookstores, says Marshall Shore, coordinator for adult services for the Maricopa County Library District.

The reason for the bold move is that the vast majority of those surveyed say the main reason they visit the library is to browse. "So we're trying to make it as customer-service friendly as possible," says Shore.

Shore says library officials felt it was necessary to make the giant leap and decided to pilot the Dewey–less library at Perry, a new 28,000-square-foot facility that will be part of the new Perry High School. Besides, he says, Dewey isn't "fail safe" and that the classification system has often confused and frustrated patrons.

One thing's for sure—getting rid of the world's most widely used library classification system has rattled some librarians. "Just the idea of this is totally outrageously ridiculous," says Francis Fourie, an assistant librarian at Walker Grant Middle School in Fredericksburg, VA. "How can you change a system—a workable, understandable system—where you can walk in any library right around the world and find the right book at the right address on the shelf."

Although Liz McMahon, a media specialist at Messalonskee Middle School in Maine, says she's toyed with the idea of ditching Dewey, she's never done it because there are too many titles that simply don't fit into one category. "At least with the Dewey decimal system, you can find the number for a book, you can follow it to the bookcase, to the shelf, and then to the book," she says.

Emily Honaker, a media specialist at Delaware Area Career Center, a vocational high school in Ohio, says making books more accessible doesn't mean having to do away with Dewey. "Some people just don't have common sense," she wrote on LM_NET, an online discussion board for school librarians. "If they want to make the library more like a book store, do it with signs rather than rearranging the library to look like a bookstore."

Others, like Lisa Moellering a librarian at Rice University, are taking a wait-and-see approach. "I see this is being done in a public library, and [since] they tend to be customer-driven, this may make sense," she says. "The goal of a public librarian is not necessarily to teach the customer, but to give them what they want."