Thursday 3 January 2008

History

Have a look at this transcript which refer to E. Morris Miller and his apparent opposition to the DDC!


Two quotes:

“one of Henry Laurie's star pupils, Edmund Morris Miller”

And further on:
“Several of Laurie's pupils, in terms of outreach into the community, were active in the cultural life of the city. One form of this activity was in the area of libraries. Both Morris Miller and another philosophy graduate, Amos Brazier, worked at the Victorian Public Library, and Miller published the first Australian monograph in librarianship called 'Libraries and Education', as well as being influential in founding the Library Association of Victoria in 1912. Miller and Brazier were involved in lengthy, internal disputes with the Chief Librarian, a man called La Touche Armstrong, over many things, including the building of the famous Reading Room dome, and the introduction of the Dewey decimal system. The philosophy graduates were hotly opposed to the Dewey system. Much of their opposition seems to have sprung from the fact that philosophers were long regarded as the ideal people to classify and categories books and were employed all over the place to do so. And the Dewey system would put most of them out of an enjoyable job, of reading and classifying endless numbers of books. Miller's opposition was so strong that when he became Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Tasmania in 1928, and later Vice Chancellor of that university, he used his influence to keep the Dewey system out of the university library, until the 1950s”