Books! Yes! People still read them. No! They're not going anywhere.
Books are still an important part of scholarly research and publishing and the library is filled with them. In most cases, you will not have to read an entire book. Many scholarly books, particularly edited volumes, will have chapters that are relevant to your topic even if the entire book is not. So don't be afraid to use a book as a source. Also, most scholarly books have an index in the back that will let you look up key terms and then go right to the page where a particular subject is discussed.
The library catalog is a listing of everything that we have at Princeton University Library. This includes not only books, but lots of other types of items like:
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Think about searching the catalog as searching for the container. For example, you are not going to find specific journal articles in the catalog, but you will find the titles of the journals themselves.
Princeton University Library uses Library of Congress call numbers to catalog and organize its books. This means that books are grouped together based on their primary topics, which librarians call subject headings.
Library of Congress Classification, Main Subject Classes:
A: General Works B: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion C: Auxiliary Sciences of History, such as Archeology,Genealogy, Biography D: World History, including history of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand E-F: History of the Americas G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation H: Social Sciences J: Political Science K: Law L: Education |
M: Music N: Fine Arts P: Language and Literature Q: Science R: Medicine S: Agriculture T: Technology U: Military Science V: Naval Science Z: Bibliography, Library Science, Information Resources |
When you find a book in the catalog, click on the title. This takes you to a page called the record. It has information about the book like author, publication year, if there's an online version available, and the call number and location.
If the book is available electronically, you'll have direct access. If it is only available in print, you can use the "request" button in the catalog record to place an order for a scan.