By Laura Hipshire
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

It’s 3 a.m. and you can’t sleep. What’s more, you’d really like to delve into a good old-fashioned mystery.

If you live at Henry Ford Village, your problem is solved; their library features more than 7,500 books and is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Recently, members of the community’s Library Committee banded together and converted the library to the popular Dewey Decimal Classification System. Invented by Melvil Dewey in 1876, the Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC) is used to classify books by grouping them into ten categories (for more information, see “Numbers game” below).

Two years in the making
The two-year project at Henry Ford Village required many hours of labeling and organizing in order to get the library up to speed. “We started with the videos,” says Caryl Kerber, chairman of the 40- to 50- person committee.

In addition to Kerber, board members Mary Jane Swartz, Donna Glenn, Ruth Haynes, Vera Kempf, Helen Henderson, and Julia Bart dedicated their time to the library, transforming it into the smooth operation it is today.

Glenn, a former librarian, holds a master’s degree from the University of Michigan in Library Science and was one of the first to suggest they “go Dewey” at Henry Ford Village when she was chairman of the committee.

Everything has its place now, whereas before books were unorganized, and it took awhile for people to find what they were looking for.

Generous donations
Every book in the library has been donated from residents at the community, and Kerber says they been extremely generous with their donations. Take Jack Quick, for example, a former General Motors executive who has lived in Japan.

“He gave us two big boxes of books on business and Japanese culture,”  Kerber says. “It really enlarges our scope of books.”

“We take everything— we don’t destroy any books. If we can’t use it for some reason, we find a good place for it to go,” Kerber says.