Perhaps you’ve had trouble locating Taylor Swift or Handel or the Drive-by Truckers in our CD collection. This is an unfortunate consequence of having such a large and diverse collection; how to organize all those artists and music genres. If every artist had just one title to their name it would be so simple!
Thus, we Dewey. Yes, that dorky sounding cataloging system is really quite ingenious when you take a look at it. Here’s a basic tutorial. The numbers to the left of the decimal point indicate the general subject and the numbers to the right indicate specific sub-categories. So the bulk of our CD collection has call numbers beginning with 781 (Music). Familiarizing yourself with a specific sub-category (the numbers to the right of the decimal point) will make your search a little easier. Soundtracks are 781.54, Country Music is 781.642, Rock is 781.66 and so on.
There are ’cheat sheets‘ located in the CD collection and of course, the Staff is always at your service, but now that you have a basic understanding of Melvil Dewey’s system, you’ll have no trouble locating those Yanni CDs you’ve been meaning to get to.
Wow, these three musicians must share the same stylist.
