If we have a book in print, here’s how you can find it:
Most will start their locating information with “McGill Library General Book Stacks”. You might also see “Oversized” (Some of the moving shelves on the ground floor) “CBB Collection” (Front room by the Help Desk) or “Juvenile” or “Young Adult” (Kids room on the left).
Then there will be the library of congress call number- lots of letters and numbers. Here’s how you can chunk that out:
QB (After Q and QA) 981 (as a whole number, after 99 but before 1000) .H (Before .Is) and then 3773 as a whole number again. 2005 is the year of publication.
This image might also provide some more examples:
The top floor has As- Some Es, the Second floor goes from the rest of the Es-PR5799 the ground floor has periodicals, oversized and PR8000-Zs There are signs on each floor and on the stairs (the second floor is especially difficult to navigate), so anyone who works here will be happy to help you track down a book.
* Wildcard. Great for searching multiple words at once (librar* = Library, librarians, libraries, etc.)
" " Quotation marks mean that you will only get results where this exact phrase appears (helpful for book titles!)
Subject headings can be your friend, especially when they show up in the sidebar
Find something good? Track citations to really see the 'scholarly conversation'. (Using google scholar)
You're going to want to approach different types of sources differently. You won't read a website the same way you read a newspaper article. And you read a critical essay or academic journal differently.
