Hi, Lovelies.
I recently started a job at the college library and that is why I didn’t do a post last week. Or at least that’s the excuse I’m going with. However, I’ve been learning some fascinating things and thought I would share them with you.
First of all, the RSU library uses the Library of Congress Classification System (LCC). Now some of you may have heard about the Dewey Decimal System, which is a great one that public schools and public libraries usually use. However, for academic libraries like colleges and stuff, they use the fancy LLC system, just because they have tons of books used for research purposes and less for popular reading.
So if you guys are interested in how to find research books in an academic library and other cool library facts, then this post is for you.
How it Works:
To start with, every book has a call number. These are the series of letters and numbers tapped on the spine of the book to identify the book and where it belongs.
Alphanumeric Subject
The call number starts with an Alphanumeric Subject, which is a couple of letters and some numbers which identify the subject of the book. For example, the letter B is for philosophy and then within this subject is smaller subjects like The Bible which gets an additional letter, in this case BS. And then, within BS are numbers like BS701-1830, which cover the Old Testament. It’s a complex system and really long and intricate.
These are put in alphabetic order and the numbers are whole numbers so you organize them from smallest to biggest.
If you want to know more about that categorization, I’d go to Library of Congress Classification Outline – Classification – Cataloging and Acquisitions (Library of Congress)
Cutter Numbers
Then we have Cutter Numbers.
Cutter numbers were created by this guy named Charles Ammi Cutter. I’ll talk more about him in my next post. Fascinating guy, definitely recommend you reading that post. Some examples of Cutter numbers have letters and numbers and look like .R354 or .S77.
However, because of the decimal point, they are read like decimals. So while it is smallest to biggest, it can be confusing because .S765 comes before .S77 because that’s how decimals work.
And sometimes we have two cutter numbers. And the second one is still read like a decimal despite the fact that they won’t put a decimal to distinguish between the two.
Other Classification
Publication Date: You know how years work, put them from oldest to newest.
Volume Numbers: You should know how numbers work, put from smallest to biggest.
Copy Numbers: Again, numbers work from smallest to biggest.
Hint: Nothing comes before something, so B comes before BA and no date comes before a date.
Conclusion
Anyways, you probably didn’t need to know that and probably don’t care that much, but I found it fascinating and thought you guys might want to know.
So have fun, looking for books in research or college libraries, now that you know how they work.
Look out for my next post because I’ll be talking about Charles Ammi Cutter.
