Robbins Library Notes

Are you confused by the arrangement of the books in Robbins? Does the organization make little sense to you? Do you spend time trying to find books by browsing, only to walk away, frustrated and unable to locate anything?

In spite of the apparent chaos of the collection, there is an order to it. In this post, I’ll outline how the collection is organized, and give you a link to an online guide that will help you find locate materials much more quickly.

Overview: Library of Congress Classification

Many of the libraries at Harvard catalog their materials according to the Library of Congress Classification Outline (hereafter LC), and Robbins is one of them, though this is a recent development in the library’s century-long history.   For almost ninety years, an in-house cataloging scheme was used.  Approximately 10 years ago, the Robbins collection was converted to LC, to facilitate cataloging and to make the collection more HOLLIS-friendly.

A good number of Robbins’ books fall into the B Class (Philosophy, Psychology, and Religion). However, given that philosophy touches on so many facets of human experience and knowledge, most of the other LC classes are represented in the collection as well, but in smaller numbers.

LC, like the Dewey Decimal System, was created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In many ways, LC and Dewey reflect the paradigms of the organization of knowledge at that time, though both have been updated many times since then, and continue to be revised even now.

Why do we use LC? Three reasons come to mind:

• For one, it is the cataloging system that is best designed for large research and university library collections such as Harvard’s — we hold over 15 million volumes in our combined collections, according to the American Library Association.
• For another, it allows the catalogers to do a great deal of copy cataloging, which saves time and helps to cut down on errors.
• Finally, it helps to standardize access to the collections of Harvard’s 86 libraries by using a common call number for books, regardless of which library or collection it sits in.

How the Robbins Collection is Organized

Roughly, here is how the Robbins collection is organized. Begin after the reference books in the first bay of the library, where the main desk and computers are located. After the reference section, the collection runs as follows –

• General Philosophy (B1 – B108)
• Asian Philosophy (B121-162)
• Ancient Philosophy (B165-708)
• Medieval Philosophy (B720-765)
• Renaissance Philosophy (B770-785)
• Modern Philosophy (B790-5739) — in here, our collection roughly falls out into these sub-divisions:
  • General Modern Philosophy
  • American Philosophy
  • British Philosophy
  • French Philosophy
  • German Philosophy
  • Italian Philosophy
  • Dutch Philosophy, i.e., Spinoza
  • Danish Philosophy, i.e., Kierkegaard
• Logic (BC)
• Metaphysics (BD)
• Psychology (BF)
• Ethics (BJ)
• Philosophy of Religion (BL-BX)
• History & Social Sciences (D-H)
• Political Science (J)
• Law (K)
• Education (L)
• Aesthetics (M-N)
• Philosophy of Language, Linguistics, Untranslated Works, and Literature (P)
• Philosophy of Science, Mathematics, Science (Q)
• Medicine (R)
• Technology (T)
• Military Science (U)

I call this a “rough” breakdown of the Robbins collection, because there are often items cataloged and placed where you wouldn’t think they would be. (I had two instance of this happen to me last week, when looking for works on Hellenistic philosophy and ancient skepticism.)

Also, in light of this rough and broad outline, you may not initially see where a book you’d like to look at may be on the shelves. For a more precise outline of how the collection breaks down, please take a look at John Shook’s A Guide to Philosophy in the Library of Congress Classification: How to find Philosophical Works in the Library. This will answer many of your “where” questions in great detail, although it will not always answer the “whys”: why an author’s works are not grouped together, or why a certain text is placed where it is on the shelf, for example.

Also, if you’re curious about how to read and understand a LC call number on a book, this article from About.com gives a concise and clear overview. Even though it focuses on geography books, you can easily take the concepts that are outlined here and apply them to other parts of the LC classification.

Finally, I’ve created a map of the layout of Robbins’ collection, to traverse the wilds of the shelves.

Hopefully, this post has removed much of the mystery surrounding the organization of the Robbins collection. Please let me know if there are other quirks of the collection that you’d like explained in a post. I’m happy to do it.