Looking Up Shelving Information

It should be easy to go to any library catalog and match the data for shelving, but not all libraries use genres to break out their fiction categories or the Dewey Decimal system for filing their non-fiction. Generally do not use catalogs from college, university, government or small public libraries. Library of Congress uses its own system and occasionally has Dewey numbers

Use the library you are assigned and find its URL at http://4042needs.org/library/search/index.html.

  1. Wake County is used first because it is a fairly large local library that used genres and is easy to locate popular fiction titles.
  2. Georgia Pines is a statewide catalog, which has some genres and uses Dewey for non-fiction. It also contains many books not easily found in North Carolina.
  3. WorldCat is a combined catalog, which is tedious to use, but gives you a world of catalogs..

How we use WorldCat

  1. Select the catalog to search: WorldCat
  2. If you are looking up a book, select: Books
  3. Type the title in the serach block and hit Search Books
  4. Scroll down and look for the exact book title with the exact name of the author
  5. Click on the title link
  6. Scroll down and select a local community or regional library, not college or university or community college
  7. After selecting the library that might stock your book, you may have to retype or paste the title in again to run the search in the library's catalog
  8. Look for the exact title and author
  9. Click only on the title link
  10. Look for Dewey number in non-fiction, but look for genre in fiction - we are looking for books labeled with one of our selected genres only
  11. Print the Dewey number or genre abbreviation and the author's last name inside the front cover in the upper right corner
  12. Send the book to shelf label preparation

When working in WorldCat, do not use your browser's back button, but use the WorldCat back button in the top left hand corner of its screen, which will return you to your query. The browser's back button takes you out of the query and you start over.