How do I process

Question: How do I process old Adventist books and old Mission books? I have a box of these old books and they don’t have a Dewey number on them.

Response: I have two responses to this question; a quick one and then a longer explanation of my quick response. First the quick response:

Quick Response: 266 for Mission stories, 221.92 for stories about Old Testament People, and 225.92 for stories about New Testament People.

Longer Explanation: The 200 numbers in the Dewey Decimal System are for Religion. The 221 – 224 numbers are specifically for Old Testament and the 225 – 228 are for the New Testament. The thick books from the ABC about Joseph, Esther and so forth would go in 221.92 since they are books about people (biographies) in the Old Testament. I noticed that the newer books from Adventist publishers have a Dewey number listed inside them. I looked inside our copy of Deborah and Barak and saw the Dewey number 222.32. I then looked up the number in our Dewey classification and saw that that classification is for Judges. Since Deborah and Barak fit into the category of “Judges” that is where the publisher listed it. But since our other books about people from the Old Testament are in the 221.92 category, we placed Deborah and Barak in so it matched our other books. That way if students are looking for stories about Old Testament people, they won’t miss Deborah and Barak. In a similar vein, the 225.92 category would be for New Testament biographies.

Mission stories would be classified in the 266 category. There are more complicated divisions of this category, such as missions originating in France 266.02344, but it really is much easier to just put our mission stories in the 266 category.

If you have a box of old mission stories lying around and they aren’t on your library shelves because you don’t know what numbers to put on them, now you can pull them out of that box and process them ready for your students to check out and read.