Melville Louis Kossuth (Melvil) Dewey (December 10, 1851–December 26, 1931) was an American librarian and educator, and the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system of library classification.
Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey was born in Adams Center, New York, on December 10, 1851, the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Greene Dewey. He attended rural local schools and early in life determined that his destiny was to become a reformer ...
more
Melville Louis Kossuth (Melvil) Dewey (December 10, 1851–December 26, 1931) was an American librarian and educator, and the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system of library classification.
Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey was born in Adams Center, New York, on December 10, 1851, the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Greene Dewey. He attended rural local schools and early in life determined that his destiny was to become a reformer in educating the masses. He attended Amherst College, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Sigma chapter). He graduated in 1874 with a bachelor's degree and received a master's degree from Amherst in 1877.
After he graduated in 1874, Amherst College hired Dewey to manage the library and reclassify the collections. For two years Dewey worked out a new scheme that superimposed a system of decimals on a structure of knowledge first outlined by Sir Francis Bacon and later modified by William Torrey Harris.
In 1876, Dewey copyrighted the ...
less
