I recently read an article in School Library Journal titled, "Kids OK With No Dewey" and thought it brought up some interesting discussion points. There is a library in Arizona that acts as both the public and school library for grades 9-12. They decided to incorporate a bookstore philosophy of organization and to (insert gasp here) abandon the Dewey Decimal classification system that we've all come to know and love (or hate). Instead the collection is grouped by subject and then organized on the shelf by the author's last name.

The philosophy here is that people have more of a tendency to browse collections to find the book they need.

Here's my thought, isn't this basically the same thing but without the numbers on the spine? Dewey groups books by subject but just assigns it a number to represent that subject. And if only a handful of libraries are following suit, how will the students have the information retrieval skills they need in other libraries such as college libraries?

Here at the Nashua Public Library we have a hybrid of this philosophy where certain collections are separated out by genre for browsing. Mysteries or business books for example, are in a different shelf location but all of the books still use the traditional classification system.

What do you guys think?