Pros and Cons of the Dewey Decimal System

 

The Dewey Decimal System (DDC) has been in use for well over 100 years, and is the most widely used library classification system in the world! But is it the best? What are some pitfalls? What are its strengths and weaknesses? To help us understand this hot library topic, let's look at some of the pros and cons, and then decide for yourself!

First, a little background (from What's So Great About the Dewey Decimal System, A Staff Report from "The Straight Dope" Science Advisory Board):

"Dewey’s innovation was to combine a numbering system (like at the British Museum) with classification by topic. However, the numbers didn’t indicate a shelf but rather a field of knowledge. Battles says, “Thus he joined the analytical simplicity of decimal numbers to an intuitive scheme of knowledge, one that would fluidly accommodate all the books ever written, and all the books that could be written as well.” Thus was born the Dewey Decimal Classification system...One of the beauties of Dewey’s system is that it provides an easy way to introduce new subjects–there have been lots of new subjects since 1876! The key was the use of decimals. Dewey began by establishing a broad division of knowledge into basic categories, to which numbers were then assigned–crudely put, these are the numbers to the left of the decimal point. That done, it was easy to add new subjects by dividing the original categories into progressively finer gradations — these are the numbers to the right of the decimal point. DDC is what today we’d call scalable — it has readily accommodated the explosion of knowledge since Dewey’s day."

Pros:

• It's a highly standardized system that is both organizationally sound, and also flexible.
• It's the most widely used method of library collection organization in the world- used by hundreds of countries.
• It allows for ongoing additions to the collection.
• 95% of all public and school libraries in the United States use it.
• It still holds up, more than a century after its development, even with massive expansion of  materials.

Cons:

• Melvil Dewey's character has been called into question, specifically with regard to his treatment of women and people of color.
• The classification system itself is accused of being biased on a few fronts. First, with regard to Black authors being classified under the "Colonialism" section, and second, for its religious bias toward Christian books and materials.
• Most colleges and government libraries use the Library of Congress Classification (LCC)
• Some argue that classifying books in this way is boring and doesn't encourage exploration of books