The Cutter Project
Technical Services at Work
With the number of books Gottesman Libraries has, students often wonder how the team organizes the storage of books and promptly retrieves them upon request. The key here is the call numbers. Our team at Gottesman Libraries uses the Library of Congress call numbers to help locate and identify the exact book we need to retrieve among thousands from the stacks. A call number can be broken down into different segments which represent details of the book. For example, the third or last line of the call number is usually the year of publication. One part of the call number is a cutter that represents which area or topic the literature belongs to.
The term cutter dates back to librarian Charles Ammi Cutter, an extraordinary cataloger who devised the Expansive Classification system on which the current Library of Congress classification scheme is based. It assigns a number to subject areas so that when books are numbered according to subject and then arranged by those numbers, books on similar topics are shelved together. In academic libraries, the Library of Congress Classification system is in place, developed in part from Cutter's expertise in analyzing and organizing books.
Our team’s cutter project entails examining books that have “.N” cutter which stands for Negro, and replacing the cutter with “.A” which stands for African-American or “.B” for Black. The process for this replacement includes first collating a list of all the books that have the “.N” cutter in their call number and retrieving the books from their respective locations. Then, each book is briefly studied in order to accurately categorize it as African-American “.A” or Black “.B”, based on its content. Once the books have been categorized, the team then replaces the physical call number on the book with the new cutter “.A” or “.B”. The cutter is also replaced in Alma (where there is a large database of all the books in Gottesman Libraries) to reflect the new call number. Once the physical and digital call numbers for these books have been replaced to show the new cutter, the books are returned to their respective locations.
The Gottesman Libraries' Cutter project currently addresses approximately 200 books for review in three sets: BF432.N5 L93-BF432.N5 L93; N6538.N5 B525 1989-PN6231.N5 S7; and PS153.N5 A32 2000-Z1361.N39 W45 1996. At the same time, it seeks to update the status of items missing or misplaced from the collection. Following the conversion of .N cutter, the project team will address the cuttering of Oriental or Chinese material.
Please find below an example of this work:
Book Cover: Hannerz, Ulf. Soulside ; Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
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Old Call Number New Call Number
For more information about Cutter, see Using the Cutter Table, by the Library of Congress.
