Why is melvil dewey famous

Wot a mes that iz! Spelling reform may be one of the most quixotic of pursuits. Dewey notably tried to live his ideal, going so far as to change his first name to Melvil, and, for a time, even shortening his family name to Dui. But as his address to the New York State Historical Association shows, he was still plugging the reformism strong in his later years :.

Yu hav askt me to tel yu briefly the meaning of this unique club. Which is the point: he believed the language should be spelled the way it sounds. Cataloging is an attempt to make order out of disorder, in the case of libraries, a way of grouping like books together. As a mixture of Germanic, Latin, French, Greek and many other words from disparate languages, English is an organic, living thing, ill-suited to straitjackets. Dewey was not particularly apologetic about his actions.

And the allegations against him did not stop once he had been edged out of the ALA. In the late s, Dewey was sued by his former stenographer, who said that he had kissed and touched her in public. But in , Wayne Wiegand published Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey , which took a frank look at both his genius and his misdeeds.

Dewey is in the past now and should not be someone that is unquestionably looked up to. The DDS section on religion starts at , and no other religion besides Christianity is covered until Though some changes have been made as new editions of the system have been introduced, the process of restructuring the entire s is a project that has yet to be undertaken.

The Dewey Decimal System is the most used library classification system, with the Chicago Tribune estimating that more than , libraries in countries use it.

As such, many libraries are experimenting with other organizational techniques, and many are dropping the DDS altogether. The main complaint that public libraries have is that the Dewey Decimal System does not make reading exciting, and that there are other ways of categorizing and organizing books that are more like that of general bookstores. By doing away with the numbers which are hard to remember for general library patrons , some libraries are classifying books simply by category and organizing by author—a system they've begun referring to as " Dewey-lite.