NOTE: Both Michelle Howard, the author of this informative post, and Liz Cottrill and Emily Kiser of Living Books Library in Tennessee highly recommend using the Dewey Decimal System to classify and organize your books. You can use LibraryThing or Michelle’s library database or this OCLC site to find the most commonly used call number in the Dewey Decimal System for any given book.

From Michelle Howard of Children’s Preservation Library in Michigan and Living Learning Libraries in Florida:

We are so excited to hear about new libraries, and new librarians beginning to organize their collections so they can be harnessed to the fullest! I always say that news of a blossoming library is about the best news possible because so many children/teens will have their inner worlds opened up in a whole new way and their hearts inspired to worthy thinking and believing, something that few can experience with only the pulp too often on other library shelves which is at best useless, and at worst toxic. Super!

As for the Dewey Decimal system, I remember feeling confused and intimidated before learning it, but now, Mr. Melvil Dewey (not to be confused with the dreadful John Dewey) is one of the first people I want to meet in heaven, and how could a serious bibliophile not be there! 😉 (Just kidding….) Once we see that the numbers have meaning, and are not a sea of random digits, it all comes together beautifully.

Anyway, it really is good naming to include “Decimal” in the system, because it follows the natural break- down by tens, just like our fingers work. So, take “all knowledge” and divide it by ten. That gives you your first main categories, and once you know those (and only eight are often used), you’ve taken the first step:

• 000s (Rarely used in youth libraries, so I won’t bog you down with details.)
• 100s (Again, rarely used in youth libraries.)
• 200s Religion
• 300s Government
• 400s Language
• 500s Pure science (observing God’s creation)
• 600s Applied science (how “pure” science is harnessed)
• 700s Art (and a bit of Recreation)
• 800s Literature
• 900s History and Geography

Now, if you were to see a Dewey Decimal number (DD#), say 523, you would already know something HUGE about it…..that it is about pure science. You’re right! You know what the number (5) in the “hundred’s place” means, and that is a lot!

Now, we can take those 500s, and break them into another set of ten, and that will give us each of the main fields within pure science:

• 500s Miscellaneous
• 510s Math