Amberly Media Center

This week and next week in media we put on our lab coats to investigate the meaning of those numbers on the spine labels of our nonfiction books. We learned that Melvil Dewey was a librarian in the 1800s who solved the problem of how to arrange his books with a numbering system based on “decimals”–groups of ten to organize subjects.

We remembered how we use letters to create words that “symbolize” objects in the real world, and talked about how numbers could also stand for real world subjects. For example, the letters “C” “A” “T” and the Dewey number “636.8″ both represent that soft, furry pet that meows.

We discussed how the numbers can be used as both a symbol for the subjects and as an “address” for shelving and locating the books. In this system similar subjects are shelved nearby, different subjects are farther apart. For example, cats and dogs are shelved nearby (but not on the same shelf at Amberly), and the wild animals are separate from the domestic animals. Horses are near the cats and dogs, but zebras are closer to the lions and tigers (oh my!).

For most of the session this week and next week, we rotated among stations with books from each of the Dewey Decimal System’s ten sections. In each one we found a couple of books that were surprising. Students always enjoy discovering Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Loch Ness Monster among the encyclopedias, books of records and lists, libraries and computers in the 000 section; the accounts of (possibly?) true encounters with ghosts among the books on optical illusions and feelings in the 100s. Many students have already discovered their favorite fairy tales and tall tales in the 300s and jokes, riddles, and poetry in the 800s, so they are beginning to see that the Dewey system isn’t just for classifying informational books.