Dewey Decimal System

Who is Dewey?

It was . One of the greatest librarians of all times.

I bet you're wondering who the brilliant person that came up with the idea of the Dewey Decimal System is?

Who put the Deweyin 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 bythe .

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 youwhere in the library to find your book.

F = Fiction

McD = first 3 initials of theauthor'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 numberfrom 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.

664.805652Number for commercial processing of kidney beans!

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.

The 100s have all the stuff a person The 100s have all the stuff a person would want to know about himself, would want to know about himself,

like what your dreams or handwriting like what your dreams or handwriting means, plus things like optical means, plus things like optical

illusions.illusions.

The are all about you!

Philosophy and Psychology

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!

Literature-

The 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 categoriesDewey 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 PointThe Decimal PointTo create the possibility of more than To create the possibility of more than

categories Dewey added the categories Dewey added the

Where in our library can you find the Nonfiction books?