The Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) is a
serially based system of numbering
cataloged records in the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
, in the United States. It is not related to the contents of any book, and should not be confused with
Library of Congress Classification
The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a system of library classification developed by the Library of Congress in the United States, which can be used for shelving books in a library. LCC is mainly used by large research and academic li ...
(LCC).
History
The LCCN numbering system has been in use since 1898, at which time the acronym LCCN originally stood for Library of Congress Card Number.
It has also been called the Library of Congress Catalog Card Number, among other names. The Library of Congress prepared cards of bibliographic information for their
library catalog
A library catalog (or library catalogue in British English) is a register of all bibliography, bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libra ...
and would sell duplicate sets of the cards to other libraries for use in their catalogs. This is known as centralized cataloging. Each set of cards was given a serial number to help identify it.
Although most of the bibliographic information is now electronically created, stored, and shared with other libraries, there is still a need to identify each unique record, and the LCCN continues to perform that function.
Librarian
A librarian is a person who professionally works managing information. Librarians' common activities include providing access to information, conducting research, creating and managing information systems, creating, leading, and evaluating educat ...
s all over the world use this unique
identifier
An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, person, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical mass ...
in the process of cataloging most books which have been published in the United States. It helps them reach the correct cataloging data (known as a cataloging record), which the Library of Congress and third parties make available on the Web and through other media.
In February 2008, the Library of Congress created the LCCN Permalink service, providing a stable URL for all Library of Congress Control Numbers.
Format
In its most elementary form, the number includes a year and a serial number. The year has two digits for 1898 to 2000, and four digits beginning in 2001. The three ambiguous years (1898, 1899, and 1900) are distinguished by the size of the serial number. There are also some peculiarities in numbers beginning with a "7" because of an experiment applied between 1969 and 1972 which added a
check digit
A check digit is a form of redundancy check used for Error detection and correction, error detection on identification numbers, such as bank account numbers, which are used in an application where they will at least sometimes be input manually. It ...
.
Serial numbers are six digits long and should include
leading zeros.
The leading zeros padding the number are a more recent addition to the format, so many older works will show less-full codes. The
hyphen
The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation.
The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...
that is often seen separating the year and serial number is optional. More recently, the Library of Congress has instructed publishers not to include a hyphen.
See also
*
Accession number (library science)
*
Authority control
In information science, authority control is a process that organizes information, for example in library catalogs, by using a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or an identifier (generally persistent and alphanumeric) for each top ...
*
Books in the United States
As of 2018, several firms in the United States rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Cengage Learning, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill Education, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Wiley.
...
*
International Standard Book Number
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase or receive ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
A different ISBN is assigned to e ...
(ISBN)
*
Library of Congress Subject Headings
The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) comprise a thesaurus (information retrieval), thesaurus (in the information science sense, a controlled vocabulary) of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use ...
*
Virtual International Authority File
References
External links
Library of Congress Name Authority File*
{{Authority control
Control Number
Identifiers
Library cataloging and classification