Notes

VISIBILITY @ 10KFT

The classification codes at the Visible are based on Melvil Dewey’s Decimal Classification Codes (DCC).

Originally published in 1876, the same year Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent for their telephone, Dewey’s Codes were originally designed to organize the library collections at Amherst College in Western Massachusetts.

At the time there were relatively few books in anyone’s collection anywhere, and the convention was to just put them on the shelf anywhere there was room, as they trickled in.

Dewey’s classic system, sporadically and often shyly evolved, is currently in use in an estimated 200,000 libraries across 135 countries worldwide. More than half of these, admittedly, are located in the United States (116,867) – but that means almost half of them are located elsewhere (42%).

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