Card Catalog
Hammond Library does not yet have an online catalog. The most comprehensive source of information about our collection is the card catalog in the reading room. The card catalog is in a dictionary arrangement, i.e. the author, subject, and title cards are inter-filed. Color coded overlays are used to identify locations of materials. The staff welcomes opportunities to help retrieve items.
Book Location by Call Number
A - BD Top Level Stacks
BF 000 - 999 Boisen Room
BF 1000's, BH - BR Top Level Stacks
BS Reading Room
BT Top Level Stacks
BV 1 - 999 Reading Room
BV 1000 - 5099 Top Level Stacks
BX - JK Middle Level Stacks
JL - Z Lower Level Stacks
Journals Lower Level Stacks
Reference Books
Call numbers that end in Ref. are reference books. These materials, including encyclopedias, concordances, and dictionaries, are located on the range in the middle of the reading room. Reference materials do not circulate.
Sermon Reserve
Materials for sermon writing have been collected on a table near the reserve shelf. These items do not circulate.
WorldCat
WorldCat is an online group catalog of books and other materials in libraries around the world, including CTS. You can access WorldCat in two ways. WorldCat tells you whether the library owns a book, but it does not tell you call number and status such as reserved or checked-out.
In FirstSearch
To access WorldCat:
1. Go to
http://firstsearch.oclc.org/.
2. Log in with Auth/Pass (Contact librarians to get them)
3. Click on the Link, "WorldCat"
Open WorldCat
Open WorldCat is an open online version of WorldCat. It is integrated with the CTS library website. The library suggests a method that you can find call numbers with Open WorldCat. This method can be used until the CTS library is equipped with our own online catalog. Find the demo
here
1) Go to the
CTS library website.
2) Type your search words, like author, title, ISBN, Keyword.
3) The system will show you a result list page. Click the item that you search.
4) The item view will show you all worldwide libraries that have the item. *Note: If you input your 60637 (CTS zipcode), the list of holding libraries will be sorted by proximity to Chicago Theological Seminary.
5) Generally (not all), libraries link their online catalog to the Worldcat searching system. So if you click the library that sets up that connection, it will direct you to that library's online catalog, from which you can find the "Call Number". Nowadays, library catalogers share a master cataloging record, which means luckily that most libraries (again, not all) share the same call number.
In practice, this works very well in most cases. *Note: this does not work in two cases, 1) when our library assigns a different call number than the master call number for our local uses, 2) when the item that you are searching for is an unique item, such as CTS dissertation or CTS' unique holdings.
