The Oddly Shelved from Fall 2013 Semester

As you can probably tell I haven’t posted on this blog in a while and it’s because I’ve been rather busy especially in the last weeks of the last semester.

Therefore, I thought I would post some of the oddly shelved examples I found and some of you have found from last semester:

• ·         BF575.H27 G55 2006 shelved as BF575.A27 G55 2006 (Yet another great reason why you should look in the sections surrounding it as well as everything that begins with BF575 or whatever beginning part of the call number you are looking for)
• ·         HG1552.E64 D49 2011 shelved as HD1552.E64 D49 2011 (Note these are now shelved on separate floors and yet because they are both H’s they still get miss-shelved among each other…make sure you search in all of these locations even if a letter is split between 2 + floors)
• ·         TR655 .H4780 2011 shelved as TH655 .H4780 2011 (Make sure you look as if it were shelved in other locations as well as all the other photography books since that area is almost always a mess and shelving nightmare)
• ·         PQ8180.17.A73 C6813 1983 shelved as PR8180.17.A73 C6813 1983 (Note PQ and PR are on separate floors like the HD/HG example)
• ·         QC981.8.C5 O77 2009 shelved as QD981.C5 O77 2009 (Not only was it shelved in the wrong letter, the decimal was completely dropped and forgotten)
• ·         P92.U5 B7 1989 shelved between P92.U5 O44 1999 and P92.U5 R8 (I’m not even going to venture a guess as to what happened here except it happens all the time so the only thing I can guess is someone was looking at it and put it back randomly, but at least it was near where it was supposed to be?)

Happy Searching!

H’s look like N’s

For a long time I had been searching for the book, HD57.7 .L4355 2005 and I couldn’t find it after 6 months so I had it submitted for reorder.  One day while I was searching in the ND’s for another book, I found my long lost missing book.  Fortunately, the library decided to shadow the record and not delete it or order another copy.

Lesson learned: H’s look like N’s especially if the call number is a bit faded…or not.

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!