Melvil dewey biography librarian gifts

Inventor of the Dewey Decimal system

Melville Louis Kossuth "Melvil" Dewey (December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931) was an American librarian and educator who invented the Dewey Decimal system of library classification.

He was a founder of the Lake Placid Club, a chief librarian at Columbia University, and a founding member of the American Library Association. Although Dewey's contributions to the modern library are widely recognized, his legacy is marred by his sexual harassment of female colleagues, as well as his racism and antisemitism.

Education and personal life

Dewey was born on December 10, 1851, in Adams Center, New York, the fifth and last child of Joel and Eliza Greene Dewey. He attended rural schools and determined early on that his destiny was to reform the education of the masses.^[1] He briefly attended Alfred University (1870),^[2] then Amherst College, where he belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, and from which he earned a b