E’s and Decimals

Another heavily used part of our collection is the E185s, otherwise known as African American history and boy are there a lot of them!  They range from 185-185.98 and beyond. 

Common miss-shelving errors in this section can be found in the E184s, or immigration history as well as a lot of decimal errors such as E185.615 can often be found with the E185.61, E185.86, or E185.68 for example.

Other less common errors are once again the cutter confusion and letter miss-reads within the cutters and rest of the call number.  One from last week that one of my students found, was E185.86 .C58214 1998 found shelved as E185.68 .B58214 1998. 

One time I found one with both a decimal miss-shelve as well as a letter mix up within the cutter as well so it was a combo doozy of a find!

A best search analysis since these can be found anywhere within this call number range, which in our library takes up about a row and a half, is shelf-reading.  I know it’s not everyone’s favorite, but it can be anywhere within this range.

Good luck and happy searching!

Random Miss-shelving Woes

Today while I was searching, I found some crazy random miss-shelving errors.       

In our library the call number beginning with S (agricultural history and agricultural sciences) are shelved with the D’s and E’s (World and American history).  Today I found an S in with the E’s.   This further stresses my point of searching all of the different letters on a floor and not just within the beginning letter.  Examples: if  S, U, V, D, E are shelved on a floor and you are looking for a DB don’t just look for it in the wide range of Ds, look in the S’s, U’s, V’s, and E’s too.  Even though a DB would end up in an SB or even an E is a rare occurrence, it has been happening a lot lately.

Further stressing my point of looking in other letters if shelved together on a floor.  See the below picture for the craziness of miss-shelving: 

As you can see there are NA's and PN's mixed in with the LB's.  While the PN's are shelved on another floor (seems as if someone was using them and then just put them back on the shelve...but beginning letters aside, at least they are numerically in order).  NA's and LB's are shelved on the same floor, so it is very important to look in every letter category on a floor.

Happy searching! 

Number Scramble!

Reading call numbers is a science-almost-art like quality that gets lost on many readers. Most folks tend to only read the beginning and the end of something, but miss the middle entirely. However, the middle often contains the most important bit of information. Such is the case with call numbers.

For some reason the beginning number after the letter(s) tend to get read this way. Here are some examples of books I have found located under this logic. First will be the call number I was looking for matched with the call number where I found it. In most cases these call numbers are located a couple sections a part, but others there was quite a bit of distance between the two.

E446 .H27 2007 shelved as E444 .H27 2007

HD57.7 .B373 2006 shelved as HD58.7 .B373 2006 (for some reason this happens all the time for these books)

HX239 .B47 2006 shelved as HX236 .B47 2006

PN3435 .L4 shelved as PN3355 .L4

PS3563.O8749 L68 2003 shelved as PS3553.O8749 L68 2003 (this happens ALL the time for all PS’s)

Of course, it would always be a good idea to look for these sort of mix-ups in other letter ranges as well such as that PS one, look for it in the same way in the PR section because it does happen (though coincidentally, I don’t have a current example…see a future posting).

So, case in point, try to mix up the numbers in between because sadly, those are the numbers that will get scrambled or worse another number will get substituted.

Happy Searching!