Olin Library Research Guides: HON 201: Immigrant Experiences in the United States: Find Books

What are these sources?

Materials in the library's collection - including books, e-books, DVDs, and many other formats - can be located through the library catalog. The catalog is not the best tool for locating articles within a journal; to do that use the databases under the Find Articles tab.

Call Numbers

Specific call numbers for books are found in the online catalog, but when browsing the shelves, it helps to know something about them. Books about history can be found shelved in the library under the following Library of Congress call numbers:

C -- Auxiliary Sciences of History
For example:

CC Archaeology
CS Genealogy
CT Biography

D -- World History
For example:

D History (General)
DL History of Scandinavia
DS History of Asia

E and F -- History of the Americas
For example:

E 151 – E 904 History of the United States
F 1 – F 975 US Local History
F 1201 – F 3799 Latin America

The broad topics indicated by the first letter of the "call number" are often broken down into subtopics with a second letter, and are then refined in much greater detail with the addition of numbers. A full listing of Library of Congress call numbers can be found here: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/

The digits in these call numbers are read as counting numbers, not as decimals as in the Dewey Decimal system. This means that DL 1175 is found between DL 1174 and DL 1179, well after DL 117 or DL 118.

This arrangement of books by subject matter makes shelf-browsing convenient. If you find a useful book, the books nearby on the shelf are likely to be closely related in topic.

Note that these call numbers are used both for the circulating collection, of which numbers beginning with C through F are all on the third floor of Olin, and in the reference collection, which is entirely on the second floor.