Dewey, Melvil (10 Dec. 1851-26 Dec. 1931), educational reformer and librarian, was born in Adams Center, New York, the son of Joel Dewey, a general store owner, and Eliza Greene. As a child, Dewey adopted his parents' strict Republican and Baptist values and by the age of fifteen had defined his larger "destiny" as a "reformer" for the masses. In 1869 his family moved to Oneida, New York, where Dewey attended a local Baptist seminary. The following year he enrolled at Amherst College, where he began working in the college library in 1872. Perceiving a potential for libraries to educate the masses, he thereafter committed his life to improving librarianship. To that interest he added others like spelling and metric reform, all of which were aimed at saving time and eliminating waste. He once calculated that if children learned a simplified phonetic form of spelling and the metric system of weights and measures used by most of the rest of the world, educators could save students at least two years' time that could be better spent reading good books.

After Dewey graduated in 1874, Amherst hired him to manage its library and reclassify its collections. He worked there for two years, and in 1876 he published A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloging and Arranging Books and Pamphlets in a Library, better known as the "Dewey Decimal Classification," an innovative scheme that superimposed a system of decimals on a structure of knowledge first outlined by English philosopher Francis Bacon and later modified by American educator William Torrey Harris.

In the summer of 1876 Dewey moved to Boston, where he helped found the Spelling Reform Association, the Metric Bureau, and the American Library Association and served each as secretary and author of its constitution; he also served as editor of ALA's new Library Journal for four years. Lacking the capital to accelerate the reforms that he hoped these organizations would bring about, Dewey decided to merge treasuries into a single account to increase the collateral against which he could borrow. He failed, however, to inform the organizations of these unorthodox business practices. When several investors in the private Readers and Writers Economy Company, which Dewey had started in 1879, discovered that he had rolled these funds into company accounts, they obtained a court injunction in 1880 that denied him access to the RWEC treasury until the accounting mess he had created could be cleared up. Forced by the injunction to admit to the organizations what he had done, Dewey lost his credibility with them but not his office as secretary. In 1881 Dewey reached a settlement with RWEC in which he split company assets with investors, and two months later he established the Library Bureau, a library and office supplies company. As the bureau's president he resumed efforts to increase efficiency in library services and to advance spelling and metric reform, and slowly he reworked his way into the good graces of the organizations that he had helped start.

In the meantime (in 1878), Dewey had married Annie Godfrey. They were to have one child.

In May 1883 Dewey became librarian in chief at Columbia College, where he implemented many of the ideas he had been marketing through the Library Bureau. In five years he turned a collection of 50,000 poorly cataloged, indifferently classified, and infrequently used volumes scattered over nine departments into 100,000 uniformly cataloged and classified volumes located in a central library; at the same time he increased circulation 500 percent. Much of this was accomplished in the face of opposition from faculty and trustees who were angered when, without full authorization, Dewey opened the world's first library school in 1887 and admitted seventeen women to its first, twenty-member class. The consternation that his changes caused at Columbia led him to accept an offer by the regents of the University of the State of New York (USNY) in 1888 to become their secretary and the state librarian. The regents also agreed to let him move his library school to Albany.

As secretary, Dewey became instrumental in augmenting the power of the USNY regents in the period between 1889 and 1899, when New York's high school enrollment increased by 250 percent, higher education student enrollment by 182 percent, and higher education faculty by 223 percent. By carefully, often quietly, guiding bills favorable to the regents through the legislature, by using his office to create a statewide lobby for higher education, and by harnessing regent powers to examine and license professionals, Dewey established minimum standards for high school and college curricula, teachers, and libraries, and eliminated scores of bogus diploma mills. In the process, however, he made many enemies. By the time a movement toward the unification of New York's separately run common school and higher education systems gathered momentum in late 1899, Dewey was accurately perceived as an obstacle and was encouraged to resign as the regents' secretary. His situation was not helped that December, when he was caught using his office to protect the interests of a nephew who ran a New York City proprietary school in violation of its own university charter.

While the regents' secretary, Dewey pushed USNY into supporting an education extension system that he would be able to control through New York's public libraries. He hoped to make coursework prepared by USNY instructors available at public libraries so that the state's citizens could accumulate enough credits to qualify for a USNY degree. As state librarian, Dewey attempted to create an environment favorable to this system by organizing the New York Library Association; setting up extension sites in public libraries around the state; creating departments within the state library for facilitating interlibrary loans; publishing bibliographies of "best" books; and establishing a traveling library system that became a model for the rest of the country. In addition, he convinced the legislature in 1892 to create a book fund to which public libraries could apply for matching grants if their collections passed inspection by a state library employee.

During Dewey's tenure in Albany, the state library's collections had grown by 1905 to 500,000 volumes, making it the fifth largest library in the country. In addition, his library school had become a model for others opening across the country. Although his metric and spelling reform efforts languished in the 1890s, he did become ALA president in 1892-1893, during which time he organized a highly successful conference for the Chicago World's Fair at which ALA exhibited a "model library" whose contents were later published as a bibliographic guide for all American small public libraries. Dewey's Library Bureau weathered financial difficulties in the 1880s but by 1900 had tapped into lucrative markets with a card-index system that greatly reduced record-keeping costs, especially for banks and insurance companies. While Dewey wanted to subordinate the activities of the bureau to his own less profitable reform interests, his business partners were ultimately able to wrest control from him in 1901 when he sought capital for a new venture, the Lake Placid Club in upstate New York.

In 1894 Dewey and his wife had established the Lake Placid Club, an exclusive rest and recreation facility in the Adirondacks. Its clientele typically included social workers, librarians, and teachers at all levels of education. In 1896 the Deweys formed a company that owned and improved the land; members of the club were permitted to use its facilities for a fee. From the beginning, however, the club admitted no one against whom any member objected, and, as a result, all Jews, ethnic minorities, and consumptives were barred. In January 1905 several prominent New York Jews publicly called for Dewey's dismissal as state librarian because of the club's exclusionary practices. Under pressure, Dewey resigned later that year. The incident also served as a catalyst for several library school alumnae who were angered by Dewey's earlier unsuccessful efforts to move the library school from Albany and by reports that Dewey had sexually harassed several ALA women in public over the years. In 1906 they forced him out of active participation in ALA.

After Dewey moved permanently to Lake Placid, he continued the club's restrictive membership practices and worked hard to improve the club's resources and its parent company. What started as a five-acre endeavor with a few out-buildings surrounding a central clubhouse in 1894 had grown by 1925 into a 10,000-acre complex with scores of buildings, several large clubhouses, a concert hall, five golf courses, and twenty-one tennis courts. Over the years Dewey also cultivated winter sports at the club; by 1930 they had become so popular that the village of Lake Placid was chosen to host the 1932 Winter Olympics.

In 1922 Dewey turned over all his assets to a Lake Placid Club Education Foundation he had set up to carry on such reform causes as metric conversion and simplified spelling after his death. That same year his wife died, and in 1924 he married Emily Beal; they had no children. In 1926 he began to spend winters in Florida, and by the summer of 1927 opened a second club there that was characterized by the same exclusionary rules as its northern sister. His efforts to make the Florida Club a success were ultimately defeated by the onset of the Great Depression.

Dewey left a substantial legacy, for good and for ill. His decimal system evolved into a familiar organizing system for controlling library collections across the world, and his efforts to identify the best books evolved into a system of published bibliographic guides, like Booklist, Public Library Catalog, and Fiction Catalog, all serials that grew out of Dewey's 1893 ALA "model library." At the same time, however, his system imposed his perspective of the structure of knowledge on these collections, the arrangement of which mirrored the narrow priorities of the communities from which he and other librarians came. While his efforts as regents' secretary transformed USNY into a powerful organization that substantially improved the quality of New York's educational system, his successes in centralizing and standardizing controls had a homogenizing influence on curricula that undervalued and often ignored the needs of diverse cultures. Finally, his efforts at Lake Placid accelerated the development of the Adirondack resort and tourist industry, but his exclusionary practices perpetuated and amplified the region's reputation for racism. Dewey died at his Florida Club in Lake Placid, Florida.

Dewey's diaries and papers are in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Reading Room at Columbia University's Butler Library. See also George Grosvenor Dawe, Melvil Dewey: Seer, Inspirer, Doer, 1851-1931 (1932), Fremont Rider, Melvil Dewey (1944), and Sarah Vann, ed., Melvil Dewey: His Enduring Presence in Librarianship (1978).