Some libraries have experimented with ditching the rigid, and at times antiquated, organizational principles of the Dewey Decimal System in favor of taking a page out of retailers’ playbooks and organizing their shelves as one would a bookstore. Deschutes County, Oregon recently overhauled its library system and experimented with shifting up the organizational structure of its stacks in a pilot program to significant success. It started in 2017, when librarians reclassified the children’s picture books, moving from alphabetizing by author name and toward topic-based classification, a move that increased circulation by 20 percent. When they reorganized the law library, they notched a 10 percent jump in circulation. After those successful pilots, the library rolled out the initiative system-wide to great effect: The average circulation checked out at any given time jumped from a Dewey average of 20 percent to almost 30 percent, with the circulation for adult nonfiction benefiting the most, rising from 15 percent to 27 percent thanks to the change.
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