Library of Congress (LC) Call Numbers are like an item's address to help you find where it lives on the shelf. Each letter stands for an academic discipline. In the image below, L is for Education, LD is for Individual Institutions - United States. Can you guess which institution is at LD781.M47 H47 2009?
A magnified image of call numbers in the LD781 range.
To read a call number, read the number from left to right or top to bottom as follows:
Lastly, the shelf is organized from top to bottom in sections, so you'll zig-zag down each section 
to look for your call number before moving to the next section of the shelves.
TIP! There are maps of the "stacks" (library shelves) at the end of each aisle.
Letter |
Subject Area |
|---|---|
| A | General Works |
| B | Philosophy, Psychology, Religion |
| C | Auxiliary Sciences of History |
| D | World History |
| E | History of the Americas |
| F | History of the Americas |
| G | Geography, Anthropology, Recreation |
| H | Social Sciences |
| J | Political Science |
| K | Law |
| L | Education |
| M | Music |
| N | Fine Arts |
| P | Language and Literature |
| Q | Science |
| R | Medicine |
| S | Agriculture |
| T | Technology |
| U | Military Science |
| V | Naval Science |
| Z | Bibliography, Library Science, Information Resources |
To drill down into the LC Classification Outline, use the link below:
Books can be great resources for your research. Many students balk at using books because they are longer than scholarly articles, but this means that these students miss out on a lot of great information. Here are some reasons to consult books as part of your research.
Locate books, articles, and more from all UC campuses and beyond in this unified discovery and borrowing system. Use filters and alternative search scopes to narrow your results. Connect via the VPN to view all content available to you. Log in to your account to request material.
EBSCO now hosts ebooks formerly on the NetLibrary platform. Minimum browser requirements: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.0, and Safari 3.0. Adobe Acrobat Reader required for viewing PDF files. Acrobat Reader 8.2 recommended. Single user access. A title become available when a user leaves the ebook page or closes the browser window.
An eBook collection from a variety of academic subject areas. View titles online. Login to use personalized tools such as the bookshelf and highlighting.
Over 90,000 eBooks in specialist subjects covering a wide area of academic content. Consolidates previous CRC Press databases.
Access to the 2021-2024 collections of ebooks from Oxford University Press covering 27 subject areas and projected to contain 1,400 titles.
1928 - present. Perpetual access to nearly every ebook title from the UC Press, which was founded in 1893 and is the sixth largest university press publisher in the United States. Contains 5,000+ titles published since 1928. Available on the De Gruyter platform.
1982 - 2004. Includes almost 2,000 OA books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.
Books, videos, and other materials in library catalogs are assigned official subject headings by the Library of Congress (LCSH) by cataloging librarians. These subject headings describe an item's content and what it is about, and are useful for focusing research on broader, narrower, or related topics. Look for subject heading links in the library catalog to find more items on the same topic. Some subject headings are dated or even problematic, and they can be changed through a petition process.
For example, the book Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom has LC subject headings to describe it like "Hispanic Americans in motion pictures" and "Race in motion pictures," but (as of 2022), "Latina" is not an official LCSH and "Latinos" is listed as a variant.
If you know the subject headings that are likely to be tagged on the item you want to find, search by Subject. California -- Merced County is an example of a Geographical Subject Heading.
Subject Headings appear as hyperlinked tags on a book's record in the library catalog.
To search by Subject Heading, start by going to the Advanced Search in UC Library Search, and use the dropdown menu to choose the Subject field.
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