The cake can be eaten, to be sure, but with less ease and appreciation.īook numbers are parts of call numbers, together with collection numbers and class numbers. Nevertheless, to pay scant attention to shelflisting is to leave the frosting off the cake. Though used throughout the library, shelflisting arranges only one class at a time. That is as it should be, for the classification and its notation arrange an entire library. The notation that represents the terms of a classification (and therefore the subject of the books) has received far more attention. The future of book numbers is surveyed.įor decades, shelflisting has been the stepchild in the family of actions involved in the marking of books for shelf arrangement. Brief surveys are made of their history, Cutter and Cutter-Sanborn tables, alphabetical and chronological orderings, Ranganathan's faceted book numbers, and Library of Congress call numbers. Book numbers are a minor but important part of classification and cataloguing. They collocate books on the shelf in a helpful manner and provide unique call numbers for every item in the collection.

Book numbers are a way of organizing and ordering books about the same subject that share the same class number.

Also, there is a reference to an attachment, which isn't part of this web version, which is too bad, because it would show you what some Cutter tables look like.)Ībstract: Book numbers (also called item numbers) combine with collection numbers and class numbers to form call numbers. They're at the bottom of that paragraph, not the document. (Note: I had three footnotes in the first paragraph. The Internet has almost nothing, so I thought I'd put this up in case anyone is curious about the bits that make up a call number and where Cutter numbers come from. There is very little written about book numbers (see References at the bottom for a list of all the major books on the topic).

Pointed out where I wasn't clear about Kate Sanborn Jones's last nameĪnd where I quoted a chronological book number table and then used anĮxample that wasn't actually shown in the quote. Very loose and vague, depending on who makes it. There is one factual mistake:ĭublin Core metadata doesn't have to be detailed, in fact, it can be I wanted to know, so when I got the chance I wrote this ten-pager. The introductory cataloguing course had, of course, covered Dewey and Library of Congress, but the details of book numbers were dismissed with a quick 'and you can add on something to indicate what volume or copy it is.' I wasn't clear on exactly what a book mark was, or title mark or collection mark, and who said you could use them, and who made the rules. I wrote this essay in February 2003 for a course in the theory of classification at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto.

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