During my three years pursuing my MSIS (Master of Science in Information Science, also known as a library degree), many people asked me, "What, do you learn the Dewey Decimal System all day?" Reader, in my years of study, I spent exactly 1 hour learning the system. The context was "Dewey was a shit person and this is a shit system, but he got there first and now we're stuck. If you end up working in a library using Dewey, most of your day will be dealing with workarounds."

Melville Dewey was Amherst College's first librarian. When Amherst decided to change its mascot a few years ago (no longer the Lord Jeffs, since Lord Jeffrey Amherst was a genocidal maniac), I suggested the "Silent H's," both because the 'h' in 'Amherst' is meant to be silent, and as a reference to the silence that librarians supposedly demand. I wanted our rallying cry at sporting events to be the sound of shushing our opponents. (Amherst's new mascot is the Mammoths.)

We watched a good PBS doc about US libraries, really enjoyed it. They didn't cover the problems with Dewey Decimal System but did discuss Dewey being a shit person. The stuff about Carnegie is especially interesting and I discovered that my local library branch is a Carnegie library. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/free-for-all/

The debate about the Dewey decimal system reminds me of the XKCD comic about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/

Situation:
There are 14 competing standards.

Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.
Ponytail: Yeah!

Soon:
Situation:
There are 15 competing standards.

Here's a 99 percent invisible episode on Alphabetical Order: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/alphabetical-order/transcript/

Because organizing things is a design problem and design problems are often more difficult than they seem.

The podcast episode also has a coda on the "hideous Melvil Dewey" (starts around 26 minutes in).

Loved this video, the problems with Dewey that others have mentioned notwithstanding. I will also heartily recommend Dropout as a streaming service, tons of fun content and easily worth $7/month.

One of the things I loved to do as an aspiring traveller (most people can't afford to do that, so ofc businesses pay to move people is how I went to County Cork in Ireland for the first time) is visit the grocery store. You learn how logistics and capitalism reflects and generates demand, I learned that I could not hack it in Amsterdam just trying to get by with English, in Japan there's the impression people don't shop for more than a day or so worth of supplies, because you're sort of lead to believe so based on portion/container sizes. Especially in Japan with exacting placement you learn that seasons/fads are a cultural/marketing construct - there are periods where pistachio is the craze, or strawberries, other times chestnuts, mint chocolate, sweet potato, black sesame AND/OR charcoal...

But you go to any combini, there is absolutely irrepressibly noticeable standardization - they will NOT lose sales due to you not being able to determine where the banana's or tobacco or beer or umbrellas are. EVERY COMPANY has near-indistinguishable sections - yogurt and dairy and prepared foods are the last aisle because it's closest to restock and needs the most monitoring by the workers, or a thousand other explanations and anthropological/economic inputs I can't fathom but innately float to when I'm looking for scissors or potato starch or instant noodles or concert tickets. But there you have it, the scary reliable safe precision of Japan comes through in this instance.