It lets people find what they're looking for. The public library in my city uses Dewey, and so did my high school. I'd be very surprised if there are any school libraries here that don't use Dewey.
The college library uses Library of Congress, and it drove me nuts. After working in a library for two years and basically memorizing the most-often used areas of the Dewey system (social studies/history, English, and science), I ended up looking at alphabet soup and wondering which floor I was supposed to go to, never mind which section once I got there.
Dewey is intuitive, as long as you know your numbers and alphabet (for the authors' names and book titles).
Some authors' works are hard to pin down into a specific genre. For example, is Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series science fiction or fantasy? It's got strong elements of both.
Some authors write in quite a variety of different genres or types of books. Barbara Hambly, for instance, has written science fiction, fantasy, and TV tie-in (ie. Star Trek). So in my own collection, I do differentiate where I put her books. Star Trek stuff is kept together. SF is kept together. Fantasy is kept together. Mystery is kept together. Historical mysteries are kept separate from plain historical fiction.
I'm in the process of keeping track of it in my Library Thing account (an online site where you can catalogue your books and there are several methods you can use to sort them). Once upon a time I used to keep track of my books in a couple of small notebooks that got weekly updates. But that's basically impossible now, since I've got so many, in so many different genres.
Yep. There have been days when I've been in the public library and decided to read something, rather than work on my own writing, so if I'm in the mood for science or art, I just go to the relevant sections and start browsing the shelves.
I ended up reading a really fascinating book about crows, by doing that.
It would be nice if the U.S. would at least use celsius for their temperatures. When American members here talk about the weather and mention temperatures, I sometimes have no idea what they're actually experiencing. It's been 45 years since I started using metric for weather, and find it so much easier to understand.
Which systems did your schools use in Poland and Germany? If you attended any pre-college/university schools in Canada, your school would very likely have used the Dewey system.
No. Just. NO.
I can just see the senior citizens and new immigrants trying to figure that out here (as in it would result in mass confusion). The main library here has 4 floors. The basement is a combination of small art gallery/meeting rooms/special events room. The main floor has a small coffee & lunch place, it's where books are signed out, and there's a small room where they sell donated books, music, and DVDs. The children's library is also on the main floor (and it uses the Dewey system for the nonfiction books).
The second floor is where the fiction books are kept, and they're sorted by genre and author's last name.
The third floor has offices, meeting rooms, and a place for teens to hang out.
The fourth floor is where I prefer to be when I go there - get my lunch downstairs, and take it up to the quiet area in the reference section (we're allowed to eat there as long as we clean up after ourselves). That's where the computers are, it's where the reference books and newspapers are, the magazines, atlases, and has a great view of City Hall Park. And if I want to read one of their books instead of my own, all I need to do is look it up in the card catalogue (online; I'm old enough to remember when the card catalogue was a collection of little cards in a set of drawers), write down the Dewey numbers, go to the section of the library where those books are, and there's the book.
No running around from floor to floor is necessary, and if a book is on one floor on one day, that's where it will always be shelved, unless they decide to switch things around (can't see that happening for less than reasons of maintenance/renovation).
Here's a tip for anyone who has a lot of books and someone offers to help you sort them: Explain to them the difference between fiction and nonfiction (I seriously had to do that with a couple of social workers who presumably went to college to get their degrees). Explain the difference between authors and editors. Explain that not all the yellow-spined books go together, because that yellow spine just means they all had the same publisher and they're really supposed to be separated by author/series (whichever may apply).
That said, I've had to make compromises. Some of my books are where they are just because that's where they physically fit. Or if it's a heavy book, it goes on a shelf that can support it. When I moved in here, my helper just put books anywhere, so I've got a lot of hardcovers to move from the lighter metal shelves to the more sturdy wooden shelves, and several hundred fanzines, comics, magazines, and pattern books to sort.
Re-read your sig. One of the ways I would interpret "Be kind" is "don't be rude."
