The library has hundreds of thousands of books and ebooks to support your research. To discover the print and online or electronic books the library owns, use Summon.
The Billington Library uses the Library of Congress Classification System (LCC) to organize most print library books. This system sorts books by subject and type of work first, not the author's name. General subjects/types of works are assigned different letters of the alphabet--these are called classes. Each class is subdivided by subclasses (an additional letter following the first) and topics, which are assigned numbers.
Together with the cutter number (which represents the author) and the publication year of the book, this combination of letters and numbers forms the book's call number.
(Image credit: hthundercroft, CC BY-SA 4.0)
To find a book by call number, start with alphabetical order (A comes before B), then numerical order (A1 comes before A10, A10 comes before A100, etc.), and so on. If you know the title of a specific book you wish to read, search for the title in our catalog to find the book's call number. If you have a general or specific subject you're interested in, you can search for that subject, find the call number of a book we own, then search nearby on the shelf for books that may interest you.
