Locating Materials

To search for works by an author, look under that author's last name. Works about the author (e.g., biography or criticism) will appear following works by that author. For especially voluminous authors, such as Shakespeare, there is a specific filing order, starting with complete works. Information about the filing order for these authors will be found just before the first entry under their name.

To search for works on a subject, look under the subject heading, which appears at the top of the card, usually in all capital letters. If you are in doubt about which heading to use, ask a librarian; there is a six-volume listing of Dictionary Catalog subject headings at the Information Desk. Some of them may seem illogical or outdated from a late-20th-century point of view; for example, the heading for World War I is EUROPEAN WAR, 1914-1918. Also, subject headings frequently proceed from a general to a specific concept; for example, the heading for the American Civil War is UNITED STATES--HISTORY--CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865.

To search for a title (for example, that of a book without a named author, or of a periodical), omit initial articles and other small words in the title. For example, if you are looking for the title of the book The London and Country Brewer, look under London Country Brewer. In the Dictionary Catalog,periodical publications of an organization or learned society typically appear under the name of the organization as corporate author (e.g., Hakluyt Society; Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.) However, many of these have been converted into CATNYP and will be found there, too.

Certain works file in a specific order under a general (or "form") title because there are so many different editions. For entries under the title Bible, for example, look at the very beginning to see how they are filed.

In the Dictionary Catalog, the call number (or "classmark" or call letters) is whatever you see in the upper-righthand corner of the card. Two classification systems were used in the catalog. The Billings system, devised by the Library's first librarian, consists of letters of the alphabet, sometimes preceded by an asterisk (*) and sometimes accompanied by other symbols:

The "fixed-order" system, in use after the mid-fifties, consists of a combination of letters and numbers in this typical pattern: A-10 1234, or more recently JFK 71-1234. The most authoritative information about a work in the Dictionary Catalog is found under the main entry, which is usually the author.