Book Lovers: Remember this Day!
On this day in 1873, Melvil Dewey, a student at Amherst College in Amherst Massachusetts, proposed an novel decimal-based system for organizing and cataloguing Amherst's library. The faculty was so impressed by his presentation he was taken on as Amherst's assistant librarian. Dewey worked from 1874 to 1877 impementing his method and making Amherst's library the first in the nation to use his new system. This method would come to be called the Dewey Decimal System, and would become one of the most widely-used systems in the United States for organizing books.