English Language & Literature

Books written by scholars and published by university presses are a good source of information for many topics.

When and Why You Should Use Books:

• You need good historical overviews of topic
• You need broad coverage of one or more topics
• You need a summary of existing research on a topic

Remember: Books may contain less recent information, often due to a lengthy publication process. Also, you may only need to read one chapter of a scholarly book!

Need to find a book? Use the following source to find books at Temple.

Can't find a book you need at Temple? Try using the following sources and request books to be sent to Temple.

You've got a call number to a book -- great! But, how do you read it so you can find the book on the shelves?

Let's look at PR851 .P74 2000 (The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot by Leah Price) as an example:

_________________________

PR
Read the first line in alphabetical order: A, B, BF, C, D... L, LA, LB, LC, M, ML...

851
Read the second line as a whole number: 1, 2, 3, 45, 100, 101, 1000, 2000, 2430...

.P74
The third line is a combination of a letter and numbers. Read the letter alphabetically. Read the number as a decimal, e.g.: .F64 = .64, .C724 = .724

Note:
Some call numbers have more than one combination letter-number line.

2000
The last line is the year the book was published. Read in chronological order: 1843, 1972, 2010…