Finding Books -- Searching the Library Catalog
- Books specifically about the Shakers have call numbers in the BX 9700's. You can browse this area in both the Reference collection (mostly the manuscript guides) or the main stacks, level 1. Additionally, often good information will be found in books that are not just about the Shakers and so may have been categorized differently.
- For example: a book that had a great chapter about women in Shaker societies might have been classified in the general area of "Women's Studies" (HQ's) and books on Shaker Art might turn out to be with other "Art" books (N's). To move beyond browsing, try the following:
- The main Library of Congress [LC] subject heading used for this group is "Shakers". If you do a subject heading search on Shakers you will see that you have not only "Shakers" but also many narrower subject headings, e.g. 'Shakers -- Doctrines', to choose from. Just skimming through this list of subject categories at first will give you a good idea of the possibilities. Also, there are several LC subject headings beginning with the word " Shaker" (singular, as an adjective) that you might also benefit from skimming.
- Later, when your searching becomes more focused, you can go directly to the sub-categories by typing the whole subject heading, e.g. ' Shakers -- Doctrines' or ' Shaker Furniture ' in a subject heading search.
- Note that there are certainly other searches that may prove fruitful in certain circumstances: e.g. searching specifically for a biography of Ann Lee (search by subject as ' Lee, Ann '); or, searching for all of Elder Evans' writings (search by author for ' Evans, F. W. ')
