Books are an excellent source for a variety of information types:
Help Using the BC3 Library Catalog
Searching by keyword
Searching by author or title
Searching by subject
What do those numbers mean?
Here at the Heaton Family Learning Commons, we have our fiction and non-fiction split by floors: fiction is on the upper level and nonfiction is on the lower level.
Other collections in the Heaton
Say you have to write a paper on ethics and the call number for the book titled Problems in Ethics is 170 M965p. If you are not familiar with DDC, this number looks confusing. However, it is following a system that is classified by numbers and letters.The 170 represents the book's subject. 170 falls within the 100s area, putting it in the Philosophy and Psychology category. The M965p portion of the call number refers to the author and book title, giving the book a unique identifier.
See below for examples of Dewey call number subject areas:
Please see the "Finding a Book" section above for usage of the online public access catalog to find your books' call numbers.
Not everything is digitized! But we do have many ebooks (electronic books). They are all listed in the BC3 Library Catalog with links to the database where they can be found.
Or you can search the ebook databases individually.
EBSCO eBook Collection
Proquest eBook Central
New York Times
EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier
The BC3 Library maintains a small collection of textbooks. In general, we do not purchase textbooks, but try to obtain as many as we can through donations from the publisher, BC3 Academic Divisions, and BC3 faculty. These are shelved behind the upper level circulation desk. Here is a list of the current textbooks available at the library.
There are numerous sources for finding books beyond the BC3 Library’s Catalog and databases. These include other library catalogs, Google books, vendor databases, and open access books. Most of these resources provide a means to identify books that you want, but usually the books will not be freely available online. However, you can use the BC3 Library’s Interlibrary Loan Service to request books and pick them up at one of the BC3 Colleg’s locations in about a week’s time. Here are links to some of these sources: