Dewey Decimal...Code or Rulebook?

Judge Garrett: In this courtroom, Mr.Miller, justice is blind to matters of race, creed, color, religion, and sexual orientation. 

Joe Miller: With all due respect, your honor, we don't live in this courtroom, do we? 

-Philadelphia 

And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner . 

-Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets? 

Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to. 

-The Matrix 

Dewey. Dewey Decimal. Dewey Decimal System. Dewey 23. People love it. People are indifferent to it. People hate it. People make jokes about it. Yet, in the library world sometimes Dewey can become some serious fucking business. This can also bring up passions in people you never knew were there. I see such things everyday in my position at a public library. Strong discussions or even battles occur over how to use Dewey standards. Some librarians like to use it as a loose set of guidelines like a compass for a sailor at night on the open sea. Personally, this is how I see it and have always seen the Dewey Decimal System. Let me just stop right there and say that I never thought for a minute at my library school graduation I would be writing an essay ten years later about people fighting about the Dewey Decimal System. That sounds absolutely fucking ridiculous. Let me show you exactly what I am talking about. 

I have noticed that one primary trend has always been the conflict between those who like to keep Dewey to a strict standard. These librarians look upon it as the Bible, the Gospel, the Truth, and going away from it is bordering upon some library degree mortal sin. They find compromising hard and look upon the Dewey book as if it held the location of the Holy Grail itself. Okay, I exaggerate, but you get my drift. Yet, there are others who look upon those same Dewey standards as more of a set of guidelines. I find Geoffrey Rush's line from Pirates of the Carribean so funny and so unbelievably appropriate. These are the librarians who will adapt, customize, change the rules of the collection to fit the collection, instead of changing the books themselves. This is why I found the quote from The Matrix so relevant because as in The Matrix Neo and company realized there are rules; some rules can be broken, bent, changed. The other quote from Philadelphia is meant to show that the people who create Dewey do a great job, but have they ever been to every library in the entire world? This would be impossible and I know for a certified fact that every library in the world is different. With such variety, why would you want to stick to a strict set of rules that does not reflect your collection? 

People need to realize that the whole point of Dewey is flexibility. Its purpose was to change, expand, contract itself. In this way, you can look at it in the much the same way that the Founders looked upon the Constitution. These founders knew that they could not create a perfect system that would never ever need to be changed. This seems unrealistic on any planet that has libraries. Like Denzel, "We do not live in this courtroom." People sometimes get too fired up about the Dewey system, but one of the things certain people need to do is one simple thing, take a deep breath and calm the fuck down. This is not life and death. We are not betraying the principles of library science or any other subject area by going against the norm and placing a discipline in something completely different than the usual place. You need to answer the simple question, "What is the best place for this kind of book in this library? Where are patron will easily find it? Please I implore you to make this place somewhere everyone can live with.