Arizona Library Ditches Dewey

The Perry Branch Library, part of the Maricopa County Library District in Arizona, finally opened its doors on June 11—and although librarians have been debating whether this Dewey-less library is a good idea, patrons could not have cared less.

"It was interesting because they didn't notice the difference," says Marshall Shore, coordinator for adult services. "Nobody said, 'What happened to my Dewey?'"

Instead, people were more excited about getting a new library. About a dozen cars sat in the parking lot waiting for it to open. And when it finally did, the library staff was on hand to help with any mayhem. But it never happened, which is pretty amazing since the staff only had enough time to place books in their subject areas, rather than alphabetize the entire 31,000-item collection, Shore says.

"The extra staff offered to help because nothing was really in order, but people said they were just browsing," Shore adds. By the end of the day, 26 babies, 67 kids from ages three to 12, and nine teens had signed up for summer reading programs, and a whopping 914 items circulated from the 28,000-square-foot library.

Getting rid of Dewey was a bold but much-needed step to make the library as "customer-service friendly as possible" and to attract more kids and the 20- to 40-year-old crowd, Shore explains. Besides, he says, Dewey isn't "fail-safe" and the classification system often confused and frustrated patrons. Perry's entire collection is shelved by topic and alphabetized by an author's last name, the same way it's done at bookstores.

So far, Perry hasn't received one negative comment. In fact, the response has been so overwhelmingly positive that Harry Courtright, Maricopa's director and county librarian, has decided to create another library sans Dewey: the 47,000-square-foot Queen Creek Branch Library, scheduled to open next year. If all goes well, up to 15 new branches that Maricopa expects to build over the next decade will follow the same trend.

It's also expected that students from the new, neighboring Perry High School will have a trouble-free experience with the Dewey-less library when school opens. The Perry branch will double as a public library and school media center, and open from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. on weekdays strictly for student use.

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 too many titles don't fit into any 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 [itself]," she says.

Perry's official ribbon-cutting ceremony will take place in mid-July.