Whether they care to admit it or not, a lot of people in our business are enamored by quaint things like etymology, parallel construction, and brick-and-mortar libraries. They are, like me, geeks in a non-technical, liberal-arts kind of way. So it may incite a bit of shock and awe when news gets around that the venerable Dewey Decimal system has come under attack.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, a new library opened last month in Gilbert, Arizona that skipped the use of Dewey entirely. Predictably, according to the article, a firestorm of debate is already underway: “‘It’s a religious war at this point,” said Ross Singer, an application developer at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s library.”

Apparently, libraries are beginning to organize like bookstores, using plain descriptions on book spines in place of Dewey codes. While die-hard Dewey defenders call this the “Googlization” of libraries, others point out that plain-English categories make libraries more inviting and easy-to-use.

As much as I hate to see such an elegant system fade away, I have to admit that I spend a lot more time in bookstores than I do in libraries. Not to mention online — can you imagine Amazon forcing shoppers to locate books using Dewey codes? People would abandon the site in droves.