Those long numbers can be very confusing, but here’s how to break them down If you see a very long number, it means that you are searching for a very specific book A lecturer has said we should look at the social issues around the palliative care for infants If we look in the 300s of Dewey we are looking at the Social Sciences, but there are hundreds of books there!

300

So let’s break it down further: Palliative care is going to be a social welfare service issue

362

But that’s still too big! We need to burrow down a bit further! But before we do, we need to understand that now we should look at each number after the dot as separate numbers. So for example, we all know a 0 is smaller than 1, and a 3 is smaller than 5. The Dewey system has some strange numbers after the dot. For example, 362.0072 will come before 362.1 even though there are less numbers present! Remember we said to take each number after the dot separately and here we can see that a nought is smaller than a one, so anything after that nought just makes things smaller than a whole one! Let’s get back to our example 362.1 equates to Physical illness, (as opposed to 362.2 which is mental illness) , so we want

362.1

But we want a specific service for children so we’ll have to go to

362.17

And then it’s not just any service we want but terminal care of infants. Terminal care is a subset of 362.17 and is at

362.175

And the final stage is to think about the terminal care of children

362.175083

This is just one example of how things are organised in the University Library. If you need further help ask at the Enquiry Desk

HOW TO USE THE DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM