Bibliographic Services — McMaster University Libraries

To support our implementation of Endeca (public launch coming soon!), we have revised some of our call number procedures.

Endeca provides for a subject browse feature, based on the LC and NLM classification hierarchy, which guides users from general to specific topics. NCSU’s Endeca catalogue is a good example.

In order for our e-resources and other “non-LC stacks” materials—such as CDs, the CODOC collection, and pre-1800 books—to be included in these results, they need to be classified. To prevent an LC number assigned to these resources from appearing as a shelving location, we opted to put it in the bibliographic record rather than Horizon’s item record. This also allows us to put a “proper” shelving location, such as a CODOC number or pre-1800 book number, in the item record for display to the user.

Endeca will look for the following fields in a bib record. Only the ‡a will be used; the ‡b will be ignored:

• 037 [HSL only. The prefix to the number (such as HSSR) will be ignored.]
• 050
• 055
• 060

Because classification numbers in the bib record are used only in searching, there can be more than one number associated with a title. A Canadian history title, for example, might include both F1015 (Library of Congress) and FC74 (Library and Archives Canada). This gives our users multiple paths to the same resource.

The new policy is now available on the Bib Services website. We hope to investigate possibilities for a retrospective fix to update our existing e-resource and other bib records.

While we hope that adding or accepting these class numbers will be helpful to our users, this is one access point among many and we need to be mindful of the time we spend on it. In some cases, we may assign a general class (BC) or class number (E18) if finding a more specific class number is proving too time consuming.