Making the Dewey Decimal System Fun!

Taking a cue from the hit reality television game show “The Amazing Race”, the Princeton Public Library is staging an amazing race of its own this summer. 

The popular CBS show features contestants who race around the world in competition with other teams. At the Princeton Public Library, this summer’s Amazing Race is not so much a competition with others, but a race, sponsored by the Youth Services Department, through all of the non-fiction categories of the famous Dewey Decimal System.

“We’re doing this to fight something known as the ‘summer slide,'" explained youth services librarian Lucia Acosta. “Studies show that typically over the summer, students can lose some of the progress they’ve made over the previous school year and actually fall behind. By engaging children in fun, exciting activities that promote learning, we are trying to prevent that slide from happening.”

For ten weeks of the summer, every Tuesday at 4 p.m., the Youth Services Department is exploring subjects in the Dewey Decimal System, the system of library classification developed in the 19th century that organizes books on library shelves into ten main classes. Each weekly activity focuses on a particular theme. For example, the first session on June 21 featured a scavenger hunt. The session on June 28 highlighted optical illusions, including the opportunity to look at familiar objects through an ultra-high magnifier that rendered them virtually unrecognizable.

Princeton third-grader Rachael Dewey (no relation to the founder of the Dewey Decimal system) was fascinated by the look of an ordinary safety pin under intense magnification.

“It kind of looks like a giant steel beam,” she observed. She was, however, disappointed with one aspect of the machine. “I had been hoping to see the bones in my hand. I thought it would be like an X-Ray.”

Alice Wilson, a Princeton fourth-grader, looked at her hand as well, and was pleased with what she discovered. “I could see my skin all scaly-looking and not at all looking the way it usually looks,” she said. “It’s very cool. I think I saw something like this in a magic set once.”

The Princeton Public Library also sponsors the summer reading program for children divided into three categories: ages 0-4, kindergarten to fifth grade and then grades six through 12. Acosta estimates that every summer for the past five years, some 1200 children participate in the program, which promotes literacy and the idea that reading and learning are fun, no matter what time of year it may be.

Thomas Dailey, a sixth grader from Cranbury, said he loves to come to the library, even during summer vacation. “Since I don’t have school I have a lot of free time so it’s great to come to the library and pick out great books I like,” he said.