Dewey Decimal System
Who is Dewey?
I bet you're wondering who
the brilliant person that came
up with the idea of the
Dewey Decimal System is?
It was
. One of the
greatest librarians of all times.
Who put the Dewey
in the
Dewey Decimal System?
established the first school for
training librarians.
In 1876,
he founded the American Library
Association
and published the first Library
Journal,
which included new library
trends and book reviews.
opened the first library
school in 1887 located at
Columbia University.
Fiction or Nonfiction?
stories are created from
the author’s imagination.
Fiction books are put on the shelf
in alphabetical order by
the
.
If your last name was Cleary, you
would have your books shelved in the
letter “ ” for Cleary.
Fiction or Nonfiction?
is the opposite of
fiction. Books that are nonfiction are
about real people, places, and things.
Nonfiction books are shelved by their
Call Numbers
A book is shelved
according to it’s
A call number is a group of numbers and/or
letters put together to tell you
where in the library to find your book.
F = Fiction
McD = first 3 initials of the
author's last name
A call number is located at the bottom of the
book on the spine.
It helps you to find your books quicker.
Once you've got your call number
from the library catalog, you can find your
book!
Let’s Look at Nonfiction Call
Numbers!
A Dewey call number
has
numbers to the left of the decimal.
To the right of the decimal, there is
no limit on number.
The more numbers you add to the
right of the decimal,
the more
the subject is.
Number for
commercial
processing of
kidney beans!
664.805652
McD
Like we care
about kidney
beans!
I can
hardly wait
to read the
book!
When Melvil Dewey devised his system
he created
main subjects and
numbers so that all nonfiction books on
the same subject would be together on
the shelf. He thought that this way
anyone looking for anything would be
able to find it easily.
Philosophy and Psychology
The 100s have all the stuff a person
would want to know about himself,
like what your dreams or handwriting
means, plus things like optical
illusions.
The
are all about you!
Religion and Mythology
Books in the
explain the world
and the heavens.
Social Sciences
The
have all kinds of
information about how people live
and work.
You could find information about
firefighters, plus things like
holidays and folktales. The 300s
are all about the social world.
Languages
The
are about languages.
This includes sign language,
dictionaries, and hieroglyphics.
Science and Math
Everything that you would want to
know about Science and Math are
here.
The dinosaur books, the animal
books, the books about plants and
planets, and science fair projects
are in the
!
Technology (Working Books)
They are sometimes called working
books because it’s where all the
information you learned about in the
500s is used to make or do cool
stuff.
If you want to learn to grow a garden
or fix your bike it’s in the
.
The Arts
In the
, you can find books
about sports, games, hobbies, and
music!
LiteratureThe
is for all the plays, poetry,
and other great books people have
written.
Geography, Biography, History
The
are where all the books
about countries, famous people,
and wars are kept.
Finally, Dewey had all his
knowledge arranged and
thought he was done, but
realized that there was a
whole category that he
missed.
So he put all of the information like
newspaper, encyclopedias, and
mysteries things like UFO’s and the
Bermuda Triangle in the
, which is
pronounced zero hundreds.
9 more specific categories
Dewey the decided to divide each of these 10 main sections into
more specific categories. This made 100 more possible
categories.
9 even more specific categories
Dewey then divided each of the smaller categories into more
specific categories. He even an even more precise number to
identify the even smaller categories.
This made a 1000 possible categories.
The Decimal Point
To create the possibility of more than
categories Dewey added the
Where in our library can you find the
Nonfiction books?