Using OU's WebCat to (virtually) browse the library collection's shelves
One of the things that all library patrons find helpful is browsing the shelves around an item they have already located which turns out to be helpful to their information-seeking. In fact, the strategy of shelf browsing is so helpful that the American Psychology Association, back in the 1970's, came up with a name for it (and other similar searching behaviors), when a set of reports they did surveying the searching/finding behavior of American psychologists (who were members of the APA) identified it as what the researchers called "library serendipity." It meant, finding something (accidentally "tripping" over) that was physically close to what you already knew about.
Of course, library classification schemes (Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal system, etc.) are intended to do exactly that for the patron who walks to the shelves to find the book he or she is specifically looking for: classification schemes seek to put like books together, or close to one another, on the shelves.
What do we do, though, when we are doing our searching through an online catalog that is available to us from anywhere in the world we happen to be located? Well, we can still browse the library's book shelves, but we have to do it through the online catalog that the library makes available to us.
We are going to show you two different ways in which you can browse the shelves of the OU library's book stacks through its online catalog. Even better, we are going to indicate to you that you should use this technique, even if you were actually starting at the front entrance of the OU Bizzell library! Why? Because a lot of the more in-demand books are already checked out of the library by someone else, so you wouldn't see those titles were you to rely on browsing the actual shelves. Let us say that again: it is BETTER if you do your shelf browsing online, because you are shown information about ALL of the titles that would have been on the shelves if they hadn't been checked out by someone else.
Conceptually, the ability to browse (virtually) a library's collection is known as looking through its "shelf list." What is a shelf list? It is a file of all of the books in a library's collection, arranged in call number order; doesn't matter that some of them are checked out of the library by patrons, because the shelf list included all the books that are officially "in" the collection. That is exactly what you are given by OU's Webcat when you ask to "browse" it by call number.
1. Finding a particular book's call number in Webcat, and browsing forward and backward from it
Lets say we are interested, again, in the book by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Well, what I am going to do, is search OU's Webcat for that book:
In response to this title search, this record appears:
When we do as it says to do in the above screen capture (click on the LC call number), we are taken to this listing in Webcat:
Notice that we have the beginning of a list, in call number order, beginning with the book whose call number we clicked on--the book by Diamond. Its classification number is HM 206. Its "book number" is D48 1997. (D48 is the "author" code for Diamond, and 1997 is the edition of this book). Those two parts (the class number and the author/book number) go together to make up the whole call number for this book: HM 206.D48 1997.
Well, now you know to find out what books are "around" a book you already know about: you find that book in Webcat and then click in its call number, browsing forward or backward from that book to "browse" the shelf list.
But, there is a second, more direct technique that can be used in Webcat to browse the shelf list too:
2. Direct browsing by call number in Webcat
From the Webcat systems top, default searching page (its Quick Search page), you can use the third tab on the right-side set of tabs to go to a call number browsing page:
Once that page is selected, just enter your call number, remembering that Webcat expects there to be a space between the initial letter or letters (H, HC, L, LB, etc.) and the numbers that follow it. (This is terribly confusing and not consistent across all library online catalogs, because other catalogs may not work if the space is there--you simply need to check that!)
For example, we were trying to browse at the beginning of the HB schedule of LC classification numbers, so we entered "HB 1":
Webcat searched to find "HB 1" but couldn't, so it returned the next higher number it did find:
Again, you can request to move backward or forward from here, just as we did before. Just use the appropriate light blue navigation buttons to do that.
3. Overview of the LC Classification system
There are several good resources for detailed tables showing what topics are where in the LC Classification system. One of them is a set of pdf files from the Library of Congress itself; the other is a set of pages found at About.com: