Dewey Decimal help

I've recently joined the Library Committee at our Quaker meeting. The library was well-maintained in the past but during the pandemic nothing happened so there is almost no one on the committee who has experience. I have five cases of boxes that were donated during the three-year lull (in my dining room!). I want to put Dewey numbers on them but I'm totally intimidated. I do understand that church libraries have different rules because otherwise everything would be categorized under the name of our religion. Can someone refer me to a basic Dewey Decimal tutorial for small church libraries?

If you enter the books using library sources like Overcat, most of them will end up with Dewey numbers.

The first thing I did when I started our church library (about 2 years ago) is look for a Dewey Decimal reference book. I found one that was just right. The title is:

A Classification System for Church Libraries (Revised Edition) Based on the Dewey Decimal Classification System. Published by LifeWay Press Nashville Tennessee, 1996. I was lucky to find this book (used). Inside it says "to order additional copies..." The phone number given in my copy is: 800-458-2772.

True - there is always a suggested Dewey # but it's great to have another source to cross check. Also. in the back is a 50 pages of a relative index of subjects such as Storytelling, Stewardship, Psychiatry, Refrigeration, etc.

I was able to find out that Lifeway.com has a digital version of this book available for $8.99. By the way, the cover is teal in color.

>1 nslator: When I can't easily find a Dewey number, I got to WorldCat and see what everybody is using for that Dewey number. I sometimes need to translate from LOC number (used in colleges) to Dewey, but there are easy charts for that.