New Books! and a New Call Number.

Today's shipment of new books brought our first book in the relatively new LC class of QV. Pharmacology and drug development, as a quickly burgeoning field, now has it own Library of Congress classification.

For now, Strategies for organic drug synthesis and design by Daniel Lednicer, is our only 'QV'. I'm sure this seems like a very modest development to those of you who don't manage libraries, but it caused me to take notice as we unpacked the new books! Now I'm looking forward to receiving books in the other new call number sequences at the end of the Qs:
QU Biochemistry
QW-QX Microbiology, Immunology, Parasites
QY-QZ Pathology, Clinical pathology

All of these topics were formerly lumped into QR (or with chemistry in QD) or with medicine (R, RM), so the additional LC class assignments will make browsing the entire collection of immunology books, for example, a bit more complicated in the future. But it should do a very nice job of bringing together newer materials in the interdisciplinary subject of biochemistry.

This development is minor compared to the leap from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress classification back in 1974. Ah, change! Information and library management is all about change, as human knowledge expands and scholarly communication evolves.