M01 ande5832 04 se c01. indd

Dewey decimal system , named after the Columbia University librarian Melvil 
Dewey, who in 1876 pioneered this practical system to facilitate classification 
of books. 
Have you ever been frustrated because you made a thorough computerized 
search, only to find that the book you wanted was not on the shelf? By learning the 
simple Dewey decimal system, you can walk to the appropriate section and see what 
books are available. For example, if you need a children’s biography of Dr. Martin 
Luther King Jr., you can walk to the section of the library where the biographies for 
children are shelved—J920. Then you can quickly scan the books until you get to the 
K s, where books about King are located. 
A short overview of the Dewey decimal system follows, and more specific infor-
mation is provided at the beginning of each genre chapter. 
The Dewey decimal system gets its name because books are shelved by sub-
jects that are grouped into ten main classes. See Box 1.3 for the Dewey decimal 
system of classification. Each class has ten subdivisions, and each subdivision 
may be broken down further by adding a decimal point and more numbers. This 
allows very specific subjects to be shelved together. The following example il-
lustrates this very well: 
973
United States History
973.7 Civil 
War 
973.73 
Battles of the Civil War
973.738 Appomattox 
Dewey categorized fiction works in the 800 section; for example, American 
fiction was 813, and British fiction was 823. Today, the vast majority of school 
and public libraries have a separate section for fiction in which books are shelved 
alphabetically by authors’ last names. Storybooks or juvenile novels are typically 
shelved in a section titled J FIC, and all the subcategories—fantasy, science fic-
tion, animal fantasy, contemporary realistic fiction, and historical fiction—are 
intermingled.