The Library of Congress (LC) is a classification system you are most likely to see in academic Libraries. It is divided into 21 classes and further divided which gives the books their number and letter call numbers.
First is the classification number identified by a set of letters
This tells you what the subject is. The classifications are below.
The following numbers are further classes under the letters.
The third line is the cutter. It is usually followed by a decimal, but it isn't always the case. It is always imaginary or presumed there. Keep this in mind when looking for a specific book and do not see the decimal.
Did you know is most cases, the letter in the cutter represents the author's last name? Use this to help you look for your book as well.
Sometimes there is a second cutter line.
The last line is the publication year.
Sometimes your instructor will ask you for primary and secondary sources. But what are they?
Primary sources are sources that come first from an event or research. These are the sources that usually try to describe what is happening in the event at the time of the event. This would be news articles, videos, photographs, or something similar with a first-hand account. Primary sources are also research done by people who had done the initial research on a topic.
Secondary sources are sources that interpret an event or research. These are sources that had not done the initial research and is analyzing the data for in-depth interpretation. Sources become secondary sources when the source ties other resources, trends, and other events to it. Secondary sources provide context and support to primary sources (an example of this would be an encyclopedia article or a newspaper article of an event twenty years ago).
You can find more sources for your research by using the article's citations in their work cited. This is called citation chaining.
Backward chaining is just as it sounds. Working backward in time. You are using your original article, looking at the work cited, and reading those articles (at least the ones that you liked the most). Since research is built on more research, this is one way to build an understanding or a case for your research. Going backward gives you the advantage of working with history and those working in the field.
Forward chaining is similar. This is when you take your original article and work to see who has referenced this article in their own article. This could take some time as you cannot go to your original's work cited to see this. You will need to go to Google Scholar to type in your article's title. Once you verified it is the same author, year, and publication, you can see how many people have cited this article and work from there. Going forward gives you the advantage of relativity and newness, but depending on how recent the article is, you might not get as many articles citing it.
Remember! You can use both methods while researching. This gives you the best of both worlds and a varied researched topic. You can keep doing this with different articles as long as you have read them and are using them in your research.
