valuation

This week I have been looking at policy & procedure for managing rare printed material in the Library.
The Dewey Decimal system was phased in by the Library in the early 1900s. Before Dewey a fixed location scheme was used to organise the collection into ten large subject fields.
A – Natural Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Fine Arts, Industrial Arts and Trades
B – History, Chronology, Antiquities, and Mythology
C – Biography and Correspondence
D – Geography, Topography, Ethnography, Voyages, Travels and Atlases.
E – Periodical and Serial literature, Reports and Newspapers
F – Jurisprudence, Politics, Commerce, Political Economy and Social Economy
G – Theology, Ecclesiastical History, Moral and Mental Philosophy and Education
H – Drama and Poetry
J – General Literature, Philology, and Collected works
K – Works of reference – Cyclopaedias, Dictionaries and Lexicons

You can still see the remains of the old classification collection on Level 3.

"Australasian" books were organised into similar divisions with an 'M' prefix.
The Letter M had nothing to do with the Mitchell Library, since its use pre-dated any thought of David Scott Mitchell's bequest. It appears to have been an unused letter between K and P!
Some of the old classification volumes were recatalogued to a Dewey location. When the Special Collections Branch was established in 1963 some of the old classification volumes were identified as rare and valuable. They were transferred into special collections and given an SC /running number location. Many of the old classification titles can only be located in the printed version of Public Library catalogue.

A location of G12S14 meant the 14th book on Shelf S of Press 12 in Class G. A Press would have been a wooden shelving unit or shelving bay.
You thought re-shelving items according to a few digits after the decimal point was difficult!