Research Guide: Books

You may already have heard of the Dewey Decimal System.  Most high school and public libraries use this system to put the non-fiction books in order by subject.  For fiction, the books are arranged by author's last name, then title.  Things work a little differently in KCTCS libraries.  We use the LC (Library of Congress) Classification System to arrange books on the shelf.  Instead of using numbers, like Dewey Decimal System, LC uses a combination of letters and numbers.  The information on the spine of a book used to find it on the shelf is called a call number.

For example, the book How the Internet Happened has a Dewey call number (004.678 MCCU) and an LC call number (TK5105.875.I57 M381554 2018)

Dewey has 10 different classes, arranged in numeric order.  LC has 21 different classes arranged first in alphabetical order by class, then by number.