Finding Books
You can access many books, ebooks, journal articles, and other sources at Oberlin. The resources below will help you to find everything we have at Oberlin and can access via other libraries in Ohio and worldwide.
Search at Oberlin
- OBIS: Catalog of the Oberlin College Library This link opens in a new windowSearch for books, ebooks, DVDs, music scores, and online films. You may also search for journals, magazines, and newspapers by title.
- Summon This link opens in a new windowSearches over 300 million items - books, scholarly articles, newspaper articles, data, digital audio, digital video, digital images, government documents, and more. It draws from the library catalog (OBIS) and many of our full-text and article-indexing databases.
Tip: Looking for book chapters? Search with Summon.
Search Beyond Oberlin
- OhioLINK Library Catalog This link opens in a new windowOhioLINK Library Catalog is a combined catalog of over 38 million books and other library materials from 116 of Ohio's colleges and universities. Requested books and other materials are delivered to your library within a few days. Catalog entries for ebooks and scholarly journals link directly to those resources.
Tip: To request an item in OhioLINK, click "Request" and select Oberlin as your school. See our step-by-step guide for help.
- WorldCat: FirstSearch This link opens in a new windowThe WorldCat catalog contains over 560 million records describing books and other items owned by libraries worldwide. Each record contains library holdings. The catalog includes books, films, scholarly journals, maps, microfilm, newspapers, sound recordings, and more. WorldCat does not include individual journal articles, stories in magazines and newspapers, or book chapters.
Tip: If you want to request something you only see in WorldCat, see our interlibrary loan guide for next steps.
Reading Call Numbers
Two major call number systems are used in the libraries: the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. As it appears on a physical item, the first line of a call number is a broad subject classification. The subsequent lines combine letters and numbers to organize items into narrower, related categories.
| Library of Congress | Dewey Decimal |
| HB Alphabetically 615 Whole number |
573.3 Whole number, followed by decimal |
| .C518 Alphabetically, then decimals (may be followed by another letter) |
.W932A Alphabetically, then decimals |
| 2018 Publication Date, shelves chronologically | e.g., 573.3 W932A shelves before 573.3 W94A |
See How to Read Call Numbers from the University of Berkeley Library for more details about LC call numbers.