Pettee was a student at the Pratt Institute’s library training program, and while she “was not a notable success in
her cataloging coursework,”1 she began learning the Dewey system that was being taught at the Institute at that
time. During her time at Pratt, she participated in a revision of the catalog at the University of Pennsylvania in
1899, and this “confirmed for Pettee that she already knew enough about cataloging that she would never again be
happy subordinating her own professional judgment and skills to someone else’s system.”2 Pettee graduated from
the Institute and began working at Vassar College in 1900,3 and this provided the chance encounter that would
ultimately lead to the development of a new classification system.