Community From Dewey to Deer: Decolonizing the library

JulieMacLellan

jmaclellan@newwestrecord ca

It started with a pair of shoes It led to a mission to decolonize the NewWestminster Secondary School library

That journey isn’t as roundabout as it might sound, if you happen to be SarahWethered

The longtime NWSS teacher-librarian is working with colleagues Jenny Chang and Lisa Seddon on an ambitious project: to transition the library’s non-fiction catalogue away from the Dewey decimal system to a more inclusive method of classification

The project has its roots in an unexpected item: a pair of Fluevog shoes

Wethered is a shoe aficionado, with a particular fondness for the footwear ofVancouver shoe designer John Fluevog.

Fluevog has a line of shoes known as the Biblio family, which pays tribute to notable librarians past and present. A couple of years ago, a new design was introduced as Melvil, for Melvil Dewey, a founder of the American Library

Association.

“That name stuck around for exactly one day,”Wethered said, telling the tale at the New Westminster school board meeting on June 20 “The Fluevog community was outraged and said, ‘You know, maybe you need to look at some background information about Melvil Dewey. He was kind of sketchy, and you may not want to put your name on a shoe with his name ’” Why?Well, Dewey may have created the famous li- brary classification system that bears his name (he copyrighted it in 1876) But he also got kicked out the very American Library Association he helped to found for “sexual impropriety,” in 1905.

“He was also racist, ho- mophobic, misogynist, anti-Semitic,”Wethered said

Even the American Library Association has distanced itself from Dewey, renaming its highest honour from the Melvil Dewey Medal to the ALA Medal of Excellence in 2019

“So this made me think, so why do we perpetuate the use of the system within our schools?”Wethered said.

As she sees it, there are other compelling reasons to ditch the Dewey decimal classification, too.

Wethered notes that, under the Dewey system, information about equity-seeking groups tends to be classified within a “very narrow and very overcrowded” designation.

“So, for example, women get less than one full number We are 305 4 We don’t even get the full 305,” she said “The 300s in the Dewey decimal system, which is social science, is kind of like that junk drawer that we have in our kitchen, where you have the old soy sauce packages, that takeout menu, with some rubber bands, a pen that doesn’t work, some batteries that may work, and for some odd reason I always have one plastic fork. And that is the 300s ”

Seddon noted all the issues with Dewey

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