School Library Musings: Making Order Out of Chaos
August 15, 2025
Those of us of a certain age learned, way back in elementary school, how to find a book in the library: by using the venerable Dewey Decimal Classification System, or DDC. A flexible organizing system, the DDC has been in use in school and public libraries around the world ever since librarian Melvil Dewey created it more than 150 years ago. Once housed in wooden cabinets with long, narrow, numerically organized drawers filled with cards—hence its moniker, the card catalog—library catalogs are now fully automated and accessible to anyone with internet access.