Cutter, Charles

Cutter, Charles (Ammi)

(1837–1903) librarian; born in Boston, Mass. After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, he became librarian of the Boston Athenaeum (1869–93) where he compiled that library's influential Catalogue. His multipart Expansive Classification system, which was designed to help growing libraries expand without completely reclassifying, influenced the Library of Congress system. With his life-long rival, Melvil Dewey, and others, he founded the American Library Association (1876).