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Tutorial: Food Stories

A class guide for the tutorial class "Food for Thought"

The Library Catalog

The library catalog is a great place to find physical items, eBooks, book chapters and other items in the Grinnell Collection. It can also find articles, but the library databases are better for that. 

Searching

  1. Go to the main library page and locate the search bar in the center of the page Main Library webpage with a red box surrounding the search bar
  2. You can change what the search is including by selecting different options in the dropdown menu. You can limit it to just the catalog items available to Grinnell users, or items Grinnell may not have but could find in other searches. To learn more about how to access items Grinnell does not have it its collection, see the instructions for TRAC and Interlibrary Loan.  The search bar automatically set to search "Books, articles & media @ Grinnell"
    1. the drop down menu of the search options in the library search bar
  3. Enter the desired search terms. This can be a title of a resources, search keywords, a subject , an author, an ISBN or any other typical search words. Once done, hit search. 
    1. the search bar with the term "art deco". A arrow labeled "search Terms" points to it. Another arrow points to the search button
  4. You will then be directed to the Primo Catalog webpage where a list of result related to your search will appear.
  5. The list of results can be refined further using the filter options on the left-hand side The filter bar options on the Primo catalog search results
    1. Availability
      1. Available online : This is useful for finding items that you can access digitally. 
      2. Peer-reviewed: This limits the results to peer-reviewed sources. Learn about peer-review on the "Identifying Sources" page of this guide. 
      3. Open Access: This limits results to items that are available to everyone, not just Grinnellians. This is helpful for people who are not students. 
      4. Physical items: This limits the results to items physically in the collection that you can pick up from the library. 
    2. Publication date: Use this to limit the results by the date an item was published. 
    3. Material type: Learn about different sources on the "Identifying Sources" page of this guide. 
    4. Subject: Library resources are organized by subjects. This can help you refine the results by a particular subject, which can be useful if your search terms are common in fields that you are not interested in seeing the results in. 

Catalog Item Page

  1. Once you see a promising result, you can simply click on the item to go to its page in the catalog. 
    1. Top barthe top bar of the catalog item page with a square highlighting the location and call number information
      1. Call numbers: see below for information about call numbers 
      2. Availability: This will show a green "available at" if the item is available or a red "not available" if it is checked out. 
      3. Book Reviews: Click this option to find reviews of the item, which can be useful for evaluating the item. 
    2. "Send To" Barthe primo catalog bar with the citation options and the permalink option highlighted
      1. Citation: The catalog makes it easy to save citations for items. Users can either click the "citation" button and copy the given citation, download an RIS file and upload it into a Citation Manager, or export it directly to Refworks, a citation management software. 
      2. Permalink: The Permalink button will provide a stable url for the item as the url in your search bar may not lead back to the item if used at a later time.
    3. The "Find in Library" bar shows where the book is located, including the floor and section as well as the number of copies in the system, the number available at this moment, and if there are existing requests for this book. It also shows what format the item is and how long it can be checked out for. In this case, it can be checked out until the end of the year. the find it bar on the library catalog page for an item
    4. Details: This section provides more detail about the item. It often includes a description of the resource, a table of contents, and other information. It also includes hyperlinked information about the creator, contributors and subject fields of the item. Clicking these items will take you to a new search page that will find all items that match those items. This is a quick way to find books by the same author or that cover the same subject. 

Call Numbers

 Call Numbers and the Library of Congress Classification System

Many Academic Libraries like Grinnell use the Library of Congress Classification system for organizing our collections. Keep in mind that each library slightly adapts the system to fit the needs of their library, so the call number for a book at Grinnell may be slightly different from the call number for the same book at the University of Iowa. 

Example: 

Python for data analysis by Wes McKinney has the call number of QA76.73.P98 M42 2013

 

Main Class & Subclass

Books are assigned a call number based on their subject classification. The first letter in the call number is the broadest subject classification, and the second letter further refines the subject classification into a Subclass. For example, a book on computer science will have the first letter "Q" for Science, and the second letter "A" for Mathematics/Computer Science. 

Library of Congress Classification system

Topic Number

This number further classifies the resource into a specific topic within the subject. For example, the book on Python has the same first two letters as THIS Book, but the numbers following the letters are different. 

Python for data analysis by Wes McKinney has the call number of QA76.73.P98 M42 2013
Statistical intervals : a guide for practitioners and researchers.by Hahn and Escobar has the call number of QA276 .H22 2017

 

The number after the decimal further divides the topic field for even more defined subject classification if necessary. In general, the fewer digits the topic number includes, the more broad the item's coverage is. 


Python for data analysis by Wes McKinney has the call number of QA76.73.P98 M42 2013

Introduction to data processing by Gary S. Popkin has the call number of QA76 .P6522

Author Identifier 

This number is a cutter of the author's name. The first letter is the first letter of the author's last name and the remaining numbers are created using the cutter system. To learn more about the cutter system, visit the Library of Congress's "Using the Cutter Table"

Title Number (Optional)

The title number is another cutter, this time made from the first word of the title (excluding articles like "the" or "a"). To learn more about the cutter system, visit the Library of Congress's "Using the Cutter Table"

Year (Optional)

The last number is the year the item was published. New versions or editions items, will have the exact same call number as their older version except for the publication date. 

The 1996 edition of C programming : a modern approach by K.N. King has a call number of QA76.73.C15 K49 1996

The 2008 edition is QA76.73.C15 K49 2008