The start of something new
The Henry County Public Library is about to start its own attempt to change the physical shelving of our adult non-fiction materials from a Dewey Decimal Classification based model to one more closely resembling the model of a typical bookstore. Our patrons have voiced a demand for a natural language based shelving system and we believe we can accomplish the task while still honoring the visions of Dr. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (namely "Save the Time of the Reader") and Michael Gorman (namely "Honor the past and create the future"). We believe that, by utilizing the shelving flexibility allowed by the bookstore model while better harnessing the search capabilities of the modern library catalog, we can retain the usefulness instituted by Dewey and improve the library experience for our patron base.
We plan on utilizing this blog to document our experiences and to allow others to trace our steps toward what we believe will be an improvement on the typical library experience. The Henry County Public Library is going Dewey free.