k e i t h e d w a r d p a u g h

Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey was born on December 10, 1851 to a poor family who lived in a small town in upper New York state. Keenly interested in simplified spelling, he shortened his first name to Melvil as a young adult, dropped his middle names and, for a short time, even spelled his last name as Dui.

He invented the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system when he was 21, working as a student assistant in the library of Amherst College. His work created a revolution in library science and set in motion a new era of librarianship. Melvil Dewey well deserves the title of “Father of Modern Librarianship.”

Dewey changed librarianship from a vocation to a modern profession.
A pioneer in library education, Dewey became the librarian of Columbia College (now Columbia University) in New York City in 1883, and founded the world’s first library school there in 1887. In 1889, he became director of the New York State Library in Albany, a position he held until 1906.

He was an advocate of the metric system, English language spelling reform and is responsible for, among other things, the “American” spelling of the word Catalog (as opposed to the British Catalogue).

Our man Melvil Dewey suffered a stroke on December 26, 1931 and passed away at age 80. Seven decades after his death, his devised system remains the most widely used library classification scheme in the world.

Big Ups, Rest in Peace.

December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931

– Keith Paugh
(largely plagiarized from the oclc)