Privacy Policy
Dewey Lookup is built to be simple and low-tracking. This page explains, plainly, what happens with data when you use it.
No accounts, no profiles
There is no sign-up and no login. We do not ask for your name or email to use the tool, and we do not build a profile of you.
What your searches do
When you look up a book, the ISBN, title, author, or subject you type is sent — through this site’s own backend — to the catalog services that hold the records, so they can return one. Depending on the book, that can include Open Library, HathiTrust, the Library of Congress, Harvard Library, K10plus, the British Library, three regional public-library consortiums (NExpress, VOKAL, and SEKnFind), Google Books (for the description and cover), and LibraryThing’s thingISBN (to check sibling editions). For a book with no record anywhere, an open-source classifier called Annif runs on the site’s own machine — your text isn’t sent out for that step. These queries are necessary for the tool to work. We don’t store your searches to identify you; the backend keeps a short-lived technical cache of results (keyed by ISBN, not by person) to be a good guest of these free services.
Cookies and local storage
The site saves one small value in your browser’s local storage (not a cookie) to remember your choice on the notice at the bottom of the page, so it doesn’t ask again. That’s it for first-party storage — it stays on your device and isn’t sent to us.
Analytics
To see roughly how many people use the site, we use Cloudflare Web Analytics. It’s privacy-first: it sets no cookies, doesn’t use local storage, and doesn’t fingerprint you or track you across sites. It records aggregate page views and referrers, not individuals.
Advertising
To keep the site free, we may show ads through Google AdSense. When advertising is enabled, Google and its partners may use cookies or similar technologies to serve and measure ads. You can review and control ad personalization at Google My Ad Center, and learn more at Google’s advertising policies. If you are in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, you will be shown a consent choice for personalized ads before they load.
Affiliate links
Some guides may contain affiliate links (for example to library suppliers or booksellers). If you buy through one, the site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate links never change the Dewey numbers or records the tool returns.
Your choices and rights
Because we don’t hold accounts or personal profiles, there’s little of “yours” for us to export or delete. You can clear the site’s stored choice anytime by clearing your browser data, and you can control advertising cookies through the links above. Depending on where you live (e.g. the EEA under GDPR, or California under the CCPA), you may have rights regarding personal data; contact us and we’ll help.
Children
This is a professional cataloging tool, not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.
Third-party services
The catalog and edition services named above, Cloudflare (which provides the site’s network, security, and cookie-less analytics), Google AdSense (when advertising is enabled), and any linked suppliers each have their own privacy policies governing their handling of data. We don’t control those services.
Changes
We’ll update this page if the site’s data practices change, and revise the date above.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Get in touch.