Desert Storm: An Arizona Library Dumps Dewey
By dumping Dewey, an Arizona library has stirred things up
By Brian Kenney, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 8/1/2007
“Libraries should be run more like businesses.” This useless platitude came into play, by my reckoning, during the Reagan Administration and crept away quietly sometime after the Enron debacle, although it still rears its head from time to time.
Libraries and businesses have vastly different missions, and comparing the two often seems specious, at best. But what businesses and libraries do have in common are customers, although libraries are more likely to refer to them as users or patrons. To succeed and thrive, successful businesses know that they need to make their customers happy, in any number of ways. How often have you chosen a store because the lines are short, the staff is friendly, the layout is easy to navigate, or the overall experience is a pleasant one?
In Arizona, the staff of the Maricopa County Library District (MCLD) is trying to make library visits—for youth and adults—a similarly positive experience. Over the years, they’ve experimented with several innovations, some of which, like self-check technology, have been adopted by libraries across the country.
At their newest library, the Perry Branch in Gilbert (which will also serve as the library for the local high school), MCLD made the decision to abandon the Dewey decimal system. Instead, their books are arranged by “neighborhoods,” broad subject areas (Gardening, True Crime), much like the ones bookstores use.
Surprisingly, this decision has attracted a great deal of attention from the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—most of it positive. Librarians’ reactions? Not so enthusiastic. Words like heresy, idiotic, and inexcusable were quickly tossed around on discussion lists and blogs. “The most shocking thing was the negative backlash and the personal attacks from fellow librarians,” says Marshall Shore, MCLD’s adult services coordinator and the mastermind behind Perry’s new Dewey-less system.
Many librarians were quick to extol Dewey as the best way to find the exact location of a specific title (it may well be). Our library educators took the “been there, done that” approach (and, yes, Ralph Ulveling tried something similar in Detroit… over 50 years ago!). Others decried the “Barnes & Nobling” of public libraries. (Whoa! We wouldn’t want to get that popular.)
What prompted MCLD to do something so radical? Here’s the craziest part: they actually talked to their patrons before the library was constructed. And over 80 percent of their users, according to Shore, told them that they came to the library not to search for a specific title, but to browse. And they wanted the library to be as easy to use as a bookstore.
The message that has come through on blogs and discussion boards is loud and clear: we librarians know what’s best. Yes, before we build a branch we do our demographic research. If more families are moving into the neighborhood, we expand the children’s room. If local immigration patterns indicate a need, we purchase more Spanish or Chinese materials. But actually sit down with neighborhood residents and ask them what they want? I don’t think so.
Keep Dewey or kill it? There are pros and cons to each approach, and what works in the 30,000-volume Perry Branch may not work in your library. But what does work is listening to your public, having the guts to experiment, and creating libraries that are more intuitive for your students and users than for you. After all, they’ve come to use our books and DVDs, our reference services and databases—not to learn our idiosyncratic systems.
