The "Incredibly Impossible to Derail This Thread" thread | Page 936 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

While working with some books today, I had an occasion to use the LC Call number PC. I thought of PC 31 who said they caught a dirty one. Now I am going to look through the LC Classification table https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/ to see what else I come up with.

PC – Romance Languages

PM – Hyperborean, Indian, and artificial languages

JL – Political institutions and public administration (Canada, Latin America, etc.)

RS – Pharmacy and materia medica
(poor Ringo with so many medical problems when he was young)

No GH

AG – Dictionaries and other general reference work

The LC Classification system is used in place of the Dewey Classification system…mainly in academic libraries.

Here’s the Dewey call number for Beatles Anthology: 782.42166 B369Zb3.

Here’s the LC call number for Beatles Anthology the way it is written on the spine label:
ML
421
.B4
B4135
2000

Here’s a picture that tells you what the elements of a call number are.

For some subjects an extra line is added to the first two lines to help keep books on a topic together. For example, in this picture

GV865 is for baseball (@Zig). The third line is to keep books about a certain player together. If this library had more than one book about Hank Aaron, both books would start with GV865 .A25 and the next line would be for the author’s last name like the B79 is for Bryant. There are some twists and turn for special circumstances, but this covers the basics of LC call numbers.

The Beatles LC number and extra line is ML421. B4. So now if you walk into an academic library you can say, “Take me to your ML421 .B4 section, please.”*

*There are a few academic libraries that use Dewey and some that have sections labeled with Dewey and sections labeled with LC. I know of one library that has Dewey on all of its older books up to a certain year because they haven’t converted all the old labels to the LC system they use for all new books.