I’ve been organizing my books at the office based on their Library of Congress classification. I needed some sort of organizing scheme, and trying to come up with my own personal scheme kept leading to the books getting disorganized. (Was I keeping that book with the coding books or the communications books? Is that a networking book or a telecommunications book?) Besides, my mom was a librarian. What can I say?

I chose LOC as opposed to Dewey Decimal because (1) that’s what all university libraries use, and (2) the LOC call number is usually printed on the back of the cover page making it quick and painless to find the right call number for the book. I’m planning to eventually organize my books at home the same way. No, I’m not crazy enough to try to do this all at once, I just pull a couple of books down every now and then and tag them with my labeler, and whenever I use something I try to label it before I put it back on the shelf.

Anyway, several times I’ve gone out on the internet and tried to find a LOC quick reference that gives a description of the classes and subclasses of the LOC system. (The class and subclass are given by the letter(s) at the start of the LOC call number.) I’ve seen this as a poster at the library, but I couldn’t find anything decent. So, the last couple of nights, I have painstakingly pulled these off the web and pasted them into a Word document. And this afternoon I tweaked the formatting until it all fit on one page.

So, here it is, in all it’s PDF glory. Library of Congress Classification Quick Reference. Disclaimer: I don’t plan to update this. Ever. So, use at your own risk and all that.