Submitted by Daisy Papa
What is a cutter and how are they established?
A call number is a combination of letters and/or numbers placed on the spine of an item at the time of cataloging. The information on the spine label gives patrons and staff the location of an item within the library.
When establishing a call number, FCPL uses the practice of assigning fiction books the first eight letters of an author's last name or the first eight letters of the series or title of the work.
The author's name is taken from the authority record provided by the Library of Congress. “The Library of Congress Authorities provides an authoritative list of names, events, geographic locations and organizations and is used by most institutions as the international standard. The Name Authority File (NAF) establishes a standardized spelling and form of the name.”
There are times when an author's last name has a different spelling on the book cover. Examples of book cover spelling being different from the authority record are The Good Son by Yu-jong Chong and Marigold Mind Laundry by Chong-un Yun. The covers show the spelling as You-Jeong Jeong and Jungeun Yun respectively.
Before submitting a Cataloging Problems form or sending the item to Materials because you think the spine label is incorrect, you can check the Library of Congress standardized spelling of the author's name in the bibliographic record.
Nonfiction books are assigned a call number consisting of a numerical number (Dewey Decimal Classification, or DDC) and the cutter using the first five letters of the author's last name. The exceptions are biographies which are cataloged using the subject's last name. The DDC is divided into 10 major divisions as follows:
000 Computer Science, knowledge, and systems
100 Philosophy and psychology
200 religion
300 Social sciences
400 Language
500 Science
600 Technology
700 Arts and Recreation
800 Literature
900 History & geography
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