Books and journals / periodicals (including the current issues of periodicals as well as the bound issues) in the library are organized by call numbers. A call number can be thought of as an "address". There are two main systems that the University Libraries at Virginia Tech uses for its call numbers. One is the Library of Congress call number system. This classification system was designed to group library materials of similar subject concentration together. The vast majority of materials in the University Libraries have Library of Congress call numbers.

The second second classification scheme is the Superintendent of Documents call number system for publications issued by the Government Printing Office, and for some materials issued by the agencies of the U.S. federal government. Many, but not all, materials received from the federal government have Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) call numbers which groups materials by agency rather than by subject. SuDocs call numbers often contain punctuation marks like slashes and colons.

Location guides are posted on every stack or book stack to assist you in locating where materials are shelved.

Use Discovery Search or search the library homepage to determine the call number for the title you want to find, and where to find the same. Books or periodicals owned by University Libraries may be searched by author, title, Library of Congress subject, and keyword.

At the Newman Library, books and bound journals, and other items are located according to this scheme:

• 2nd floor: A-Z, Open Knowledge Collection, Popular Reading Collection, DVDs
• 3rd floor: A-S, Juvenile, Scripts, Microforms
• 5th floor: T-Z, Government Documents (SuDocs), Folio, Maps Folio, Cassettes, CDs and Slides

You may look at the floor maps or the interactive maps of Newman library to find the general location of an item by the call number.

Please also visit other branch libraries for information about the locations of their items.