Module 3

I was amazed to learn how young Melvil Dewey was when he developed his decimal system for organizing books by subject.  At the time, he must have believed that he had an important role to play in the Information Age of his era.  His self appointed task was to organize the information he had at hand in order to give it a more powerful strength of signal, if you will.  By organizing the books, Dewey was reducing the uncertainty of the information seekers that entered his library.  As it turned out, his system, while flawed, has stood the test of time and continues to be a relevant organization tool in our Information Age.


My impression of Mr. Dewey is that he must have been an imposing personality with good leadership skills to obtain the faculty's buy-in for his project, at such a young age.   I have read that he had a difficult personality.  I can imagine that his opinions were forceful.  I also have the impression that he had a great deal of confidence.  To believe that he could reform the way the entire country spelled words, he must have thought very highly of himself indeed.  He was a genius in his own way, and probably somewhat eccentric.  In a previous class, I learned that Melvil Dewey opened the first library school, and that he allowed women to enroll.  This was unheard of at the time, and angered many, but he was not deterred from his goals.  I applaud Dewey's energetic optimism and enthusiasm for order and efficiency.

Weinberger’s point that the Dewey Decimal System cannot be fixed is accurate, in my opinion.  The system was based on the collection of books that Dewey oversaw at the time.  It is logical that a collection of books in the United States in the 1800s would not represent a comprehensive global view of all of the world's knowledge.  Any attempt to fix the system would perhaps satisfy some proponents of change, but there would always be others who would find the system lacking.  Additionally, the astounding amount of effort needed to reclassify the existing collections that use Dewey staggers the mind.  Finally, knowledge is a fluid thing.  The Dewey Decimal System is a map of the knowledge known to Melvil Dewey at the time of his system's creation.  Today's system would look very different, and tomorrow's different from today's.  A fixed DDC would be a temporary situation.
 
Weinberger refers to a “memory palace” in our text.  While I have made use of many mnemonics, I don't believe that I can claim to have created one.  Back in the day, when I had to create RS232 cables for dumb terminals, I used a mnemonic to remember which color wire went to which pin, but the phrase has long since left my memory.  My earliest memory of learning a mnemonic was when my mom taught me how to remember how many days each month had by reciting the months while ticking them off on my knuckles.  Brilliant!  Or so I thought at the time. My mom helped me make sense of what appeared to be random data, turning it into information and allowing me to reach understanding.