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Once upon a time, back when books were first being printed, they were organized in very simple ways--by their title, the author's name, and sometimes even by color or size! But as more and more books were produced, a way of organizing them more efficiently became necessary.
In those early library days, books were numbered chronologically according to when they were added to the collection, and were shelved according to that number. But there was still no rhyme or reason to this method. If you wanted a book about history, for example, you might have to look through all the books until you found the one you wanted!
The Library of Congress was established in 1800 in Washington D. C. President John Adams authorized $5000 for the purchase of "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress." The original collection consisted of 740 volumes and three maps. Thomas Jefferson created the post of Librarian of Congress in 1802 and personally recommended many of the new titles the library acquired.
In 1814, the British attacked the capitol and the then 3,000-volume library was destroyed. Jefferson sold his private collection to Congress for the sum of $23,940 (equal to more than $1 million dollars in today's currency). The new library collection nearly doubled the size of the original library to 6,487 volumes.
Along with the collection, came Jefferson's classification system. It relied on shelving books based on their subject matter. In that way, all the history books were in one place, all the science books were together, and so on. Jefferson's method was eventually adopted by the Library of Congress and was used for many years.
By the mid 1800's, two other shelving systems were being developed. Melvil Dewey introduced the Dewey Decimal System which was published in 1876. It used numbers to classify materials according to their subject matter.
Charles Cutter was busy working on his system, which added a decimal and letter (usually the first initial of the author's last name or the first letter of the title) to the numbers. This is the system Clark State Community College Library and most other academic libraries use.
Toward the end of the 19th century, a group of librarians decided to discontinue using Thomas Jefferson's system and formally created the Library of Congress Classification System, which closely followed the Cutter method. This system is still being updated today, as new formats have been added to libraries (not just books anymore: there are video and audio cassette tapes, music CD's, CD-ROM's, maps, microform, periodicals, music scores, and many others.)
For detailed information about the history of the Library of Congress, please visit: http://loc.gov/loc/legacy/loc.html