So library materials are organized into collections, right? Right! But there’s a little more to it than that.

Imagine you were starting your very own library and you had a few thousand books, magazines, maybe some CD’s, photographs and other materials. How would you organize all those sources so that any person could come to your library and find things easily? What if your collection grew to include a few million items? Could your collection logically adapt and expand? Remember, it’s important to plan for the future too….

Libraries organize their collections of materials by subject. These subjects are represented by letters and numbers OR CALL NUMBERS that make up a classification system.

Call numbers are found on each library item and serve as its unique “address” telling you where the item is located in the library.

There are two major classification systems:Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress (LC) Classification System.