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A call number is like the address of a book. If you have the call number, you can find where the book lives in the library. It's made up of letters and numbers in a very specific combination that designates the subject and the author of that specific book.
So how do you read a call number?
The first line is made up of one or two letters and is meant to be read in alphabetical order.
The second line is a number. Sometimes it has a decimal at the end. If so, it would be after the same number without a decimal.
The third line has a decimal, a letter, and some numbers. Read the letter in alphabetical order, then the number like it was a decimal. This is where it might get confusing. For example, this book would come before PN 6747 .S3 and after PN 6747 .S12. Remember decimals technically continue on forever with 0's.
Sometimes the fourth line looks just like the third line with the actual decimal in front of the letter. That means you read it just like the third line (alphabetical then like the number is a decimal).
The last line could be a year, representing the year it was published, so read it as a number!
Sometimes the last line might be v.1, or c.2, or the call number might end at the third line! If you have a hard time finding the book, please ask us for assistance!
Information on searching for books, refining your search, and getting books we don't have!
Below is a list of our most popular article databases. These are great places to start if you need a scholarly journal article!
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. It will help you explore a wide range of scholarly content through a powerful research and teaching platform. Journals are always included from volume 1, issue 1 and include previous and related titles.
Nexis Uni contains company and industry information for business research as well as codes, court cases, and other legal information. Nexis Uni also provides access to an array of newspapers and full text journal articles for legal and business research.
General reference database for over 175 subjects from magazines, journals and newspapers, including peer-reviewed and scholarly works.
Research the pros and cons of current issues and enduring social issues through full-text articles, multimedia, primary sources, government documents and reference materials.
Have you ever had an assignment where you have to use scholarly journal articles or peer-reviewed articles?
Academic or scholarly journals are a type of periodical, like a magazine or newspaper. "Periodical" means that it's published on a regular schedule and not just one time, like a book. Academic journals have articles like regular magazines, but the articles are meant for academic purposes. These journals are published by academic institutions, about specific subjects, and they're focused on narrow, precise topics.
Most importantly, academic journals and academic articles are peer-reviewed. This means they're reviewed and approved by people in the same field for quality and credibility.
You can't get peer-reviewed articles in Google because the peer-review and publishing process takes a lot of money, so we have to pay to access them. That's where the library comes in! The library pays for access to databases full of scholarly journal articles so you can have access to them as a student.
We have a bunch of different article databases on different subjects (like an education database, a psychology database, etc) that you can use when you're doing research. I recommend ProQuest Central for people starting out with their research, because it has articles from a bunch of different subject areas.
Your professors and librarians recommend these library databases because the articles in them have been specifically selected for quality, which makes them more reliable than a lot of things you can find elsewhere on the Internet. This doesn't mean everything in an academic article is true! But you can generally trust an academic article more than something else that hasn't been reviewed.
There's nothing wrong with using Google in your research! While it can't find everything library databases can, we all use it every day and it's a powerful tool.
Here are some tips and tricks for searching with Google:
Sometimes your instructors will tell you can't use any websites as sources, but sometimes you can. Many times, people don't trust a lot of things on the web, for good reason. However, there are some things you can keep in mind to make sure the websites you use are trustworthy.
One of the most frequent questions I get is about how to know whether or not a website is trustworthy. The truth is that it depends on your assignment and how you want to use the information. Keeping that in mind, here is a list of things to keep a look out for when using web sources. This list is called the CRAAP Test. CRAAP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.
