Only a small percentage of the collections now in libraries
are available in digital or computer-readable form. Where do you
start to find the information you need?
In order to gain knowledge you must to acquire information. In
order to acquire information you must know and be able to use the
information sources.
Even with the advent of electronic publishing on the Web, the
majority of information is still published in print format and
housed in actual libraries. Understanding the way libraries are
organized and how to locate books, magazines, or audio-visual
materials is still necessary. Very few books that you will need
for your research will be found on the Internet. Alas, you will
have to get dressed to go to the library.
In order to improve your searching efficiency and productivity
libraries use classification systems based on subject to organize
materials. The most popular classification system in Lithuanian
Academic Libraries is Universal Decimal Clasification (UDC). It
provides detailed schemes (tables) to assign call numbers to each
book in the library collection in open shelfs. Since this
classification system is based on subject matter, similar
materials are shelved next to each other. This is both logical
and convenient. As you look for a specific book, you can browse
the other books shelved on either side. Browsing in this fashion
is often helpful in the research process.
All Library materials are shelved according to acquisition date
and item's size in the book storage (letters indicates the size
ot item). The call number is the main mark indicating the place
of item in the shelf.
Call numbers are made up of a combination of letters and numbers.
For example, D 123456, is a call number for a book in the KTU
Library collection. You could consider the call number as the
address of the book on the shelf.
Along with call numbers, subject headings are assigned to each
book in the collection as it is processed and input in
computerized data base of library's holdings (OPAC). In
Lithuanian academic libraries, the controlled vocabulary from
which the subject terms are selected, is the Library of Congress
Subject Headings translated into Lithuanian (Medical Libraries
use MESH).
LC Subject Headings provide valuable information. The inclusion
of a subject field increases your ability to access records that
best meet your research needs. For example, if you were searching
for books about Nuclear physics and you were not able to do a
subject search (pretend no subject headings had been assigned)
what would you do?
You could do a title search using the word -nuclear physics- but
you would only retrieve those books which included the word
nuclear physics in the title field. You would be excluding a lot
of useful material. By doing a subject search, you will retrieve
materials which are very relevant to your topic. The computer
matches the term (or terms) entered. It does not interpret the
information or think for you.
OPACs offer several advantages over the traditional card catalog.
For example, more advanced searching options than the usual
author, title, and subject are available. You will see this
illustrated shortly. In addition a computerized system enables a
library to offer remote access to the catalog - that is access
from outside the physical library.
As we discussed earlier, databases are comprised of records. A
record in an OPAC represents a book, journal, a compact disk, or
other library materials. Another way to think about a record is
that it describes the important information about an item, such
as title, author, publisher, physical format and publication date.
The record lists information that will help you determine an item's
usefulness and location. Each library decides what type of
materials, other than books, are contained in the database.
We have to use cards catalogue in our library when we are
loooking for books older than 1990. We have two types of
catalogues: alphabetical and systematic. When we want to define
the area of the book, we use subject headings. If we know UDC of
the book we look for in the systematic catalogue where all cards
of this area are in alphabetical oder. Also in such way we have
to find the books written in Cyrillic because this alphabet is
not using in computer-based data.