NOTE: Both Michelle Howard, the author of this informative post, and Liz Cottrill and Emily Kiser of Living Books Library in Tennessee highly recommend using the Dewey Decimal System to classify and organize your books. You can use LibraryThing or Michelle’s library database or this OCLC site to find the most commonly used call number in the Dewey Decimal System for any given book.

From Michelle Howard of Children’s Preservation Library in Michigan and Living Learning Libraries in Florida:

Once a book is labeled by its Dewey Decimal number, then it is (usually) secondarily labeled by the author’s last name.  See, you’ll still get to enjoy your words! Yes, you would have 523.2 CLARK, and then 523.2 COTTRILL on your shelf, for example.  

The only exception to this rule, and it makes perfect sense, is when the “subject’s” last name is more useful to note. For example, all the 921s (the individual biographies) are secondarily sorted (after the number 921) by the person the book is ABOUT! That way, all the books about Florence Nightingale are together, at 921 NIGHTINGALE. (I actually just use the first five letters of the last name, so they fit better onto the spine of the book.)

So, any time books are grouped by the person they are ABOUT (Robin Hood in the “legend” section or missionaries in the “missionary” section or composers in the “music section,” for example), I followed the lead of my local library and sorted those secondarily by SUBJECT’s last name.  

As Emily Kiser said so well the other day, libraries are for USING. So, whatever makes the book the most LOGICAL to locate is the “right” way to do it.  And as she also said, once you have more books than you can keep track of on a 3×5 card (okay, I’m paraphrasing a bit), it is wonderful to have Mr. Dewey logically laying out your collection so that it really gets USED! If you are instead grouping books by series or some other factor, the books will likely be used much less often because a family can’t walk over to the SUBJECT and then find all your books on that subject for each of their variously-aged children. And when you see that happen, the labeling and “broken up sets” are worth it. 

Yes, I love the look of a “beautiful set” as much as anyone. So, I have my own personal sets in my living room. But in my working library, the sets work too; they are where the kids can find them, by topic. And for any child who DOES enjoy reading through entire sets (a request I am only too happy to support), I made sure to include “series info” in my database, so I print a report of all a series’ members, and they love to locate them and then enjoy! It makes it more of a treasure hunt for them!

This post is part of our Ask The Librarian series, a Card Catalog Project. You can find more articles like this one here. And, we would love to connect with you! You can find us on Facebook here.