ALBANY — A century after Melvil Dewey called Albany and the State Library home, the city's newest public libraries are poised to abandon his famous decimals.

The shift starts next month at the overhauled Pine Hills branch, where the book collection will be sorted not by the Dewey Decimal System but by subject categories similar how it's done in most bookstores.

With the reopening of the Western Avenue branch, Albany may become the largest public library system in the state to move away from the rigid categorization scheme, entering a swirling debate in library circles on how useful Dewey's innovation — under which books are assigned numbers in hierarchical categories — remains in the 21st century.

Just last week, the trade magazine Library Journal featured "The Dewey Dilemma" on its cover.

And in what may be a lesson in the ways libraries are evolving, the first official public announcement of the switch in Albany came via Twitter.

"People come in and want a cookbook," Mary Coon, who as the head of collection management services has spearheaded the effort, said matter-of-factly, "they don't want 641.5."

In recent weeks, library staff members have been reclassifying tens of thousands of nonfiction books. Fiction already is largely classified by author.

Within categories — such as business, law, history, poetry or pop culture — the volumes will be ordered according to author's last name. Biographies will be arranged according to subject.

Among the concerns about the system, however, are that some categories may be too broad to quickly steer patrons to exactly what they're looking for, which the Dewey system was designed to do.

Similar changes will follow at the renovated Delaware Avenue and Howe branches, along with two new branches slated to open in the spring on New Scotland Avenue and Henry Johnson Boulevard and eventually at the existing branch in the North Albany YMCA.

For now, the main library on Washington Avenue will keep Dewey's eponymous numerals — though that could change depending on how well the new system goes over in the branches, said Carol Nersinger, the library's new executive director. Nersinger, who joined the APL in July amid its $29.1 million branch-improvement plan, said the shift reflects a fundamental fact: Eighty percent of patrons say they're browsing, not looking for a specific titles.

And while the Dewey Decimal System provides a precise way to order, locate and re-shelve books, it allows for little flexibility in how the stacks are arranged, and patrons simply won't check out what they can't see, Nersinger said.

The bookstore model is "perfect for the browser," said Nersinger.

In the 133 years since Dewey devised it, his decimal system's weaknesses have also been laid bare. There were no computers in 1876, so Dewey never left room for them in his classifications, leaving the inheritors of his legacy to shoehorn them in, starting at 000. Other new developments lead to increasingly long and dizzying decimal strings.

"It's equivalent to the phone numbers," Nersinger said. "We're running out of phone numbers."

Not to mention that Dewey's system reflects cultural biases, others point out, like the fact that the vast majority of the 200s — the section devoted to religion — is somehow tied to Christianity, leaving little space for everything else, Coon said.

Going "Dewey free" — as it's called — has been more popular in the West, where population growth has fueled new library construction, said Michael Borges, executive director of the New York State Library Association and a trustee at the Guilderland Public Library.

"Everybody's going to wait and see what happens because this is probably going to be the first significant-sized library (in New York) to implement the system," Borges said.

Asked what he thought Dewey might make of the development, Borges said: "I think he would believe that whatever system works best to serve to patrons of any particular community is what the library should use."

Albany is taking some of its cues from the DeWitt Community Library, just outside Syracuse, which shifted to a hybrid Dewey system in early 2008. The library uses broad subject categories, but stuck with the decimal system within those categories.

That library's executive director, Wendy Scott, said reaction to the switch has been distinctly generational, with the younger set embracing it while older patrons have been slower to come around. Outreach and education will be crucial to Albany's effort, Scott said.

On Friday, 25-year-old Annita Asonye of Albany perused the selection in the main library and said she wouldn't mind the death of Dewey if whatever replaces it makes sense.

"As long as it's efficient and it's easy, that's all that matters," Asonye said.

Meanwhile, 54-year-old George Vasquez of Rensselaer, who uses Dewey to help steer him to diabetic cookbooks and volumes on computer construction, said he still misses the card catalogue, long since replaced by computer databases, and isn't keen on the decimals disappearing.

"I'm old-fashioned. I like the old ways," Vasquez said. "I'd probably be lost."

Not all librarians are sold, either, Coon and Nersinger acknowledge. The Library Journal article noted that Dewey's system is still the most widely used in the world and that fewer than 12 percent of librarians surveyed favored abandoning it altogether. "For librarians, yes, it's quite a switch — especially if you went to library school 30 years ago and this is what you grew up with," Nersinger said. "Librarians want that searching process — they enjoy that — but most people just want the answer."

Carleo-Evangelist can be reached at 454-5445 or jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com.