Melvil Dewey

Melville Louis Kossuth "Melvil" Dewey (December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931) was an influential American librarian and educator, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, a founder of the Lake Placid Club, and a chief librarian at Columbia University. He was also a founding member of the American Library Association. Although Dewey's contributions to the modern library are widely recognized, his legacy is marred by allegations of sexual harassment, 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. He briefly attended Alfred University (1870), then Amherst College, where he belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon, and from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1874 and a master's in 1877. While still a student, he founded the Library Bureau, which sold high-quality index-cards and filing-cabinets, and established the standard dimensions for catalog cards. As a young adult, he advocated spelling reform; he changed his name from the usual "Melville" to "Melvil", without redundant letters, and for a time changed his surname to "Dui."