biography
| name: |
Dewey, Melvil (Louis Kossuth)
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originally Melville Dewey
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1851–1931)
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| biography:
| Librarian and cataloguer, born in Adams Center, New York, USA. He studied at Amherst College (1874 AB), and his experience as a student working in the college library led him to propose his decimal-based system of classifying books. He published this as A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging... a Library (1876). He was a founding member of the American Library Association (1876), founding editor of the Library Journal (1876–80), and an activist in the spelling reform and metric system movements. He was appointed librarian of Columbia College (now Columbia University) (1885–8) in New York, where he founded the first professional school of library services (1887). When he moved to Albany, NY to become director of the New York State Library (1888–1905), he took the library school there. In 1893 he and his second wife, Emily Beal, created the Lake Placid (NY) Club, which pioneered recreational winter sports. |
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