Charles Ammi Cutter (1837–1903), inspired by the decimal classification of his contemporary Melvil Dewey, originally developed his own classification scheme for the collections of the Boston Athenaeum, at which he served as librarian for two dozen years. He began work on it about 1880 and published the first schedules in the early 1890s. His five-volume catalogue of the Athenaeum collection is a classic in bibliographic history.