Using LCC to Classify Literature
Most things in LCC are classified according to subject. However, literature is organized a little bit
differently. You need to know the citation order of all of the aspects or facets to find the right number.
What is literature?
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literature includes things like fiction (novels, short stories), drama (plays, monologues), poetry,
and essays, letters, etc. of literary authors
includes rhetoric, the literature itself and history and criticism
literature can be in anthologies or collections or can be individual works
non-literary works by literary authors are classed by subject, for example a book on economics
by Margaret Atwood would be classed with economics not with her literary works
How is literature different from other areas of LCC classification?
 usually topic is the most important aspect in LCC
 when classifying literature, language and form and time period are more important than topic
o for example if you had a book on English drama about money, the "English literature"
aspect and the "drama" aspect are more important than the theme of "money"
 Language is generally more important than nationality therefore Canadian literature is split in
LCC between English PR9190-9199.3 and French PQ3900-3919.3 and all other languages
Canadians may write in.
o Note: for Canadian literature most Canadian libraries use a related schedule called
PS8000 created by Library and Archives Canada
Literature is organized based on the assumption that a user is studying a particular literature (e.g.
English literature) from a particular place and is interested in all of the works of a particular literary
author. Therefore, all of the collected works, selections, individual works, autobiographical materials,
history and criticism related to an individual sit on the shelf together.
Here is an example of how to break down a literary topic into its aspects to help drill down in the
classification. The example is "representation of childhood in British Victorian poetry":
Facet/Aspect
English (British) literature
About works of multiple authors
Criticism (in the history area unless about the
discipline of criticism)
Form discussed: poetry
Period: Victorian
Theme: childhood
Classification range/number
PR1-6126
PR1-1369.23
PR80.2-990
PR500-614
PR591-599
PR595.C45
Before we look closely at this example let us look at the literature schedules in general.
Subclasses in schedule P:
Below is a partial outline for the P schedules:
P1-1091
PA1-199
PA201-899
PA1000-1179
PA2001-2915
...
PB1-3029
PC1-5498
PD1-(7159)
PE1-3729
PF1-5999
...
PJ1-(9500)
PK1-(9601)
...
PN1-6790
PQ1-3999
PQ4001-5999
PQ6001-8929
PQ9000-9999
PR1-9680
PS1-3576
Philology. Linguistics
Classical philology
Greek philology and language
Medieval and modern Greek language
Latin philology and language
Modern languages. Celtic languages
Romance
Germanic
English (language)
West Germanic
Oriental philology and literature
Indo-Iranian philology and
literature
Literature (General)
French literature
Italian literature
Spanish literature
Portuguese literature
English literature
American literature
There is a general section for Linguistics and a general section for Literature. Then you will notice that in
the case of the Western languages the linguistics and the literatures are in separate sub-schedules, for
example English language in PE and English literature in PR.
Because this is the classification for the Library of Congress, American literature has its own schedule.
The P schedules have their own set of tables P-PZ which you will see referred to throughout. Most of the
time the hierarchy or enhanced browser will expand these for you.
All of the examples we will do for this class are in the PR section for English literature.
Within each literature here is the general order:
1. History and criticism for the literature as a whole, not focussed on one author
2. Collections/anthologies of more than one author
 generally not things specifically written for the publication in hand, things collected by an editor
from other publications
3. Individual authors - collections, individual works, biography, history & criticism
 doesn't include subdivision by form (except in Elizabethan drama)
 individual authors in LCC are grouped:
o by language and literature (nationality)
o then by period
o and then in alphabetical sequence
 the same author may have different numbers if they have written in more than one language
 to figure out the country, look at the author's most productive years or country with which the
author is usually associated
 this doesn't include an author's non-literary works. For example, if Margaret Atwood writes an
article about poetry, it is classed with criticism of poetry not with Margaret Atwood (unless she
is criticizing her own poetry!)
4. Non-national or local literature, e.g. German literature written in Africa, English literature written in
France
You can see this order when you look at the PR class in the hierarchy browser in Classification Web:
In the previous screenshot:
 PR1 down to PR6126 is the range for all of English literature in Britain.
 The first 2 ranges PR1-56 and PR57-78 are about the disciplines of literary history and criticism
o you may not see this general section in all literature schedules
 Starting with PR80.2 we get into things pertaining to English literature itself
 PR80.2-990 "History of English Literature" - this is for history and criticism of more than one
author
 PR1098-1369.23 - "Collections of English literature" - this is for anthologies of more than one
author
 As soon as you have something by or about an individual author you need to be looking at one
of the time periods from PR1490 Anglo-Saxon down to PR6100 2001 Then for English literature not written in Britain you have PR8309-9680 "Provincial, local etc."
(note there is a whole other subclass, PS, for American literature)
So let's see how this work s using the topic " representation of childhood in Victorian poetry." Looking
above we need to be in PR80.2-990 "history of English literature" because we don't have something by
or about an individual author, we have criticism of many authors. Remember that the "Criticism" in the
PR schedule is for the discipline of criticism, once we have criticism of a type of English literature we
need to be in the history of English literature section. It is not intuitive.
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PR80.2-990 "History of English Literature" - this is for criticism of more than one author
Then within that range there is a section for poetry:
And within poetry we see:
 special topics
 special forms, A-Z
 by period
So we need to make a choice at this point -- do we want special topic "childhood" or time period
"Victorian"? Since time period is generally more important in literature in LCC I would start there and
see the options. I drill down until I find the Victorian era:
Once we've chose Victorian era PR591-599 we can see it is controlled by a table (PR1 modified), but as
long as you are in the enhanced browser or the hierarchy browser it should apply the table for you and
you will see that under Victorian we have the option "Special topics A-Z":
Expanding that list you will get to children as a topic:
To get us to PR595.C45 which means Children as a topic in Victorian era poetry in English literature.
That gives us some sense of how general history and criticism is organized but what about the works of
individual authors? How is PR organized? What are the number ranges given to an individual?
Remember that these schedules were started in the 20th century so that for pre-20th century authors
they had a good idea of how prolific an author was or many resources had been written about a pre20th century author.
Allocation of numbers
 For pre-20th century the individual authors have ranges based on their publications and what is
written about them, e.g. Shakespeare and Goethe have over 300 numbers each!
o go to Shakespeare in Classification Web and have a look, start at PR2750
This is just the beginning, there are many numbers associated with Shakespeare:
Some authors are prolific but have a smaller range, such as:
 50 number range for people like Robert Browning starting at PR4200
 most people have 1 number or 1 cutter number
 all 20th and 21st century authors just have 1 cutter number regardless of the amount of works
they produce;
 that is one classification number per letter of the alphabet and then a cutter number for each
individual author that starts with that letter;
o e.g. Richard Clayton PR6053.L38
You can see above a list of authors whose first names begin with "C" who wrote in the time period of
1961-2000. They are arranged in alphabetical order within "C" by cuttering for the second letter and
onwards of the last name:
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.H473 for Chevalier
.L283 for Clanmorris
.L38 for Clayton
These cutters do not start with "C" because "PR6053" classification already means "individual authors by
the letter C"; the "C" is already taken care of letting us use more unique cutters for arrangement.
But we can't have every single book by and about Richard Clayton with just "PR6053.L38." Just like with
the biography table we need to further subarrange his works using Table P-PZ40. All classification
numbers in PR for 20th and 21st century authors are subarranged using this table unless otherwise
specified.
If the number you need is in LCC then the hierarchy and enhanced browsers will expand the table for
you. If you have to create your own number then you will have to refer to the table. First let us look at
an example where the number exists in LC. The image uses the enhanced browser just so that we can
see the whole table at once:
Arrangement within an individual author:
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collected works
translations
selected works, selections
separate works by title
biography and criticism – only for major authors pre-20th century can you bring out topic
This is the same arrangement as the biography table.
If you had a collected work by Richard Clayton published in 2005: PR6053.L38 2005
If you had an English translation of collected works in 2005: PR6053.L38 A2 2005
If you had a 2005 book by Richard Clayton called "Mythical dragons": PR6053.M98 2005
If you had autobiography in 2005: PR6053.L68 Z46 2005
If you a criticism written by Tom Abbott in 2005: PR6053.L38 Z52 2005
Let's work through some examples.
Questions to ask yourself before classifying: gather the facets
1. what language and nationality?
2. by/about an individual author or many authors?
3. Is it the literature itself or history/criticism?
4. What is the form of the literature or the form being discussed?
5. What is the time period of the literature or of the literature being discussed?
6. Any other special aspects or themes?
On the handouts for this class (in SharePoint) there are exercises. This goes through the first 3 examples.
1. Images of Death in the novels of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We're just going to get a classification number for this one, not a full call number. I haven 't given the
author and date.
a. First we want to work through the facets we need to have information about:
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English literature (language English, nationality British)
individual author (not about the works of several authors)
o multiple authors may have written this book about Coleridge; the important thing is it
is ABOUT the works of an individual author
history & criticism (not the work itself)
the form being criticized is novels
the time period of the novels: late 18th/early 19th century (you can look this up in reference
sources)
special aspects: death as theme
b. Next, we need to find the class number. We can browse down to Coleridge but that would require
paging through a large number of pages. We start by knowing he will be in "PR" and have an idea of the
range and then use the classification search.
Get an idea of the range by looking at the PR schedule. We can see 19th century is PR3991-5990:
c. Go to the LC Classification search: (make sure your search options have "entire hierarchy" chosen).
We can search on coleridge as the caption and PR as the classification:
We can see the result: PR4470-4488
d. Click on the result.
This range uses table P-PZ32 but we don't have to worry about that too much if we are in the hierarchy
browser or the enhanced browser; the table is applied for us if you click on his name. Before we click:
e. Expanded after we click on his name (this is the hierarchy browser view)
f. So we need to look back to our aspects and see what we've covered so far:
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English literature (language English, nationality British)
individual author (not about the works of several authors)
the time period of the novels: late 18th/early 19th century
So the other aspects to try to bring out are:
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history & criticism (not the work itself)
the form being criticized is novels
special aspects: death as theme
Since we know this is history & criticism of his novels in general, not a particular work, we can jump
down to:
PR4484-4487 - Criticism which has the following break down:
This isn't just a general work of criticism, it is about his novels and it has a theme of death. Therefore we
will want to explore our options under "Special" at PR4486-4487:
This is not about his sources therefore look at PR4487. A-Z - Other, A-Z:
If you use the arrows at the top right of the page you can page until you find your topic:
So your answer is: PR4487.D4 plus then your cutter number and date if I had given you full publication
information. For example if I wrote this book in 2010: PR4487.D4 H58 2010
To summarize:
PR3991-5990 English literature--19th century
--PR4000-5990 Individual authors
---PR4470-4488 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (use Table P-PZ32 modified)
----PR4484-4487 Criticism
-----PR4486-4487 Special
------PR4487.A-.Z Other A-Z
--------Death = PR4487.D4
2. Collected works of Agatha Christie, 2000
Again, first we want to work through the facets we need to have information about:
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English/British literature
individual author (not works of several authors)
literature itself/works (not criticism)
form: none specified
time period: 20th century
no other special aspects or themes specified
Next, we need to find the class number. We can browse down to Christie but that would require paging
through a large number of pages. We start by knowing she will be in "PR" and have an idea of the range
and then use the classification search.
Get an idea of the range:
Now in this case there are 2 ranges for the 20th century, 1900-1960 and 1961-2000. We will try a
classification search to see which range she is in. Otherwise we would need to find some biographical
information to find out when the majority of her works were published. Date range is based on
published works of the author, not date of birth
Go to Classification Search and search on Christie as a caption and PR as the number. Now that we have
a 20th century author we just see one classification numbers with cutter instead of a range: PR6005.H66
Click on the number.
Let's examine her classification number: PR6005.H66
PR6005 = individual authors 1900-1960 whose last name starts with "C"
.H66 = because we've already got the "C" covered by the PR6005 to get the rest of the classification
number for the literary author we cutter starting with the 2nd letter in Christie, which is "H" and then
we would generally use the Cutter table. In this case LC has already assigned a number to Agatha
Christine with PR6005.H66 so we use that instead of creating one ourselves.
Then we need to figure out what to do next to sub-arrange the books by Agatha Christie and represent
"collected works" if we can.
The number says beside it "Table P-PZ40. This is the table used for all 20th and 21st century authors. If
you click on her name the table will expand (this is the hierarchy browser view):
We have "Collected works" so we want to look at the first range. Click on Collected works
We see PR6005.H66 date
By date
And we can see some numbers in round brackets e.g. (PR6005.H66 A11-.H66 A13). These are numbers
that used to be used but aren't anymore. Now they just use the first line. You can tell this from the
scope note.
We know from the exercise this collected works was published in 2000 so our complete number is:
PR6005.H66 2000
We don't need to cutter for the author again, Agatha Christie, because the number already means
Agatha Christie and because the instruction said "By date" which means we add the date and we're
done.
To Summarize:
PR6000-PR6049 1900-1960 (based on when started to publish/flourish)
--PR6001-PR6049 Individual authors
"Subarrange each author by Table P-PZ39 or P-PZ40 unless otherwise specified"
---PR6005 C (because last name is Christie)
"The author number is determined by the second letter of the name"
--PR6005.H66 (LC has already established a cutter for her)
---subarrange by Table P-PZ40
------.x
date
Collected works by Date = PR6005.H66 2000
3. Women in the works of Agatha Christie / Susan Talbot, 1999
For this next exercise we already know most of the facets regarding Agatha Chrstie from question 2 but
there are a few differences in bold below:
 English literature
 about individual author (not about the works of several authors)
 history & criticism (not a work by Agatha Christie)
 form: none specified
 time period: 20th century (1900-1960)
 special aspect: women as theme
and we know who wrote the criticism (Talbot) and what year (1999).
So, we already know that the number for Agatha Christie is PR6005.H66 and is sub-arranged by table PPZ40:
This time we want the Biography and criticism area so we will click on that:
We don't have a periodical, dictionary, autobiography, or letters, we just have a criticism. Our only
option is "general works". The table does not allow us to be more specific. This is common for 20th-21st
century authors
Our range is PR6005.H66 Z5 - PR6005.H66 Z999
Why is our cutter choice for the author, Talbot, restricted to Z5-Z999?
Because all of the other cutter numbers have already been used to bring out collected works,
translations, separate works etc. In fact most of the A-Z range, .A61-Z458 is used for separate works, the
individual creations by the author being classified.
This leaves a range from Z5-Z999 to represent the author of the criticism, Talbot. Since "T" is near the
end of the alphabet I would use something like "Z94". It is near the end of the range but still leaves room
for other authors at the end of the alphabet. If we had "Abbot" we would use something like "Z52".
Then we just need to add the date of publication: PR6005.H66 Z94 1999
To summarize:
--PR6001-PR6049 Individual authors
"Subarrange each author by Table P-PZ39 or P-PZ40 unless otherwise specified"
---PR6005 C (because last name is Christie)
"The author number is determined by the second letter of the name"
--PR6005.H66 (LC has already established a cutter for her)
-----------.x Z5-Z999 Biography & criticism; general works
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only have Z5-Z999 to arrange alphabetically
Talbot is near the end of the alphabet, so might choose Z94
PR6005.H66 Z94 1999
By forcing all of the criticisms into the "Z"s the arranged forces this order on the shelf:
 Collections
 Translations
 Separate works
 Serials, dictionaries, indexes
 Autobiographical stuff
 Other biographies and criticism
I'm going to add one more example, of an author that is NOT in the classification schedule but we can
still create a number.
We are going to classify Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling, 1997.
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English/British literature
individual author (not works of several authors)
literature itself/works (not criticism)
form: novel
time period: 20th century (1961-2000)*
no other special aspects or themes specified
*J.K. Rowling is tricky in terms of time period because she started publishing close to the turn of the
century. With a new author we pick the time period they started publishing because we don't yet know
how many things they will write. This puts Rowling in the 1961-2000 time span.
So the range is: PR6050-PR6076
If I go to LC Classification search and search on caption Rowling and classification PR -- no results! This is
because not every author makes it into the classification schedule. But we can still classify Rowling by
going back to the hierarchy browser and searching for PR6050:
We can see that PR6050 is for anonymous works and then it gets into individual authors. Also note that
at Individual authors it says "Sub-arrange each author by Table P-PZ40"
So let's click on the range PR6051-6076 for Individual authors and then scroll down to "R" for Rowling
Note that it is reminding you that "PR6068.A-Z" is for authors beginning with the letter "R" and that to
get the cutter you will go to the second letter of the last name.
If you click on R you will see that some authors have been added. Rowling will be added eventually.
So now we need to Cutter for the rest of "Rowling" starting with the second letter "O". Additionally I can
see that there are already authors there so I want to put Rowling between Rowan and Royce
alphabetically:
 PR6068.O846 Rowan
 PR6068.? for Rowling -- we could choose .O848 to fit close to Rowan but leave room; if you want
you can also check the LC catalogue to see what they've used on her books.
 PR6068.O98 Royce
So now we have the start of our class number: PR6068.O848 but we need to sub-arrange to bring out
the novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
We know from the instructions at PR6051-PR6076 that sub-arrangement is by Table P-PZ40. I gave you
this table in your handouts but you can also search it in Classification Web.
If you are in the LC Class browser then at the top click on "Tables"
Then look for P-PZ40:
And expand the table if you are in the hierarchy browser:
What we have is a separate work by title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
So our base number is: PR6068.O848
The table has: P-PZ40 .xA61-.xZ458
Ignore the table number and you have: .xA61-.xZ458
What is the .x again? it is standing in for whatever your cutter is! Just like in the banking examples last
week
So the table really is saying: .O848 A61- .O848 Z458, that is your range
Your title begins with "H" so you don't have to worry about "A61" or "Z458" just cutter for "Harry" as
normal: H37
Final number: PR6068.O848 H37 1996 -- we don't have to have a author cutter, we already have
represented Rowling in the class number. The call number means an individual book by Rowling that
starts with H.
Please work through these examples in Classification web and through some of the exercises and ask
questions.