New Students' Library Guide

Borrow a book, or a hundred.

Remember your student card when you want to borrow from our libraries. You can borrow up to 100 items at a time, from any library branch.

Visit the Borrowing Information page for details about our borrowing conditions

Locating a book on the shelf

Each item has a call number which is like the book's address on our shelves. This number is made up from numbers which indicate the general category the book belongs to, numbers which indicate the specific topic, and letters that give further details about the author or title.

The catalogue record show you the call number and tells you which library houses the book. Once you're in the right library, every one of our book shelves has a number range listed on it to help you find books more quickly.

The University of Melbourne Library organises its collections by using Dewey Decimal Classification (with the exception of the Law and the East Asian collections). You don't need to remember what the numbers mean, but it can help to be familiar with the top level categories for your area of study. 

Example

To get to the subclass for the book The Planets by Carmel Reilly the Dewey number grows like this: