Display

I’ll admit, I’m much better working with words or music than with visuals. So I’ve been hemming and hawing about which is the best way to display these new call numbers in our catalog.

For our Library of Congress holdings, a call number looks like PN1997 .A18 2002 or ML403 .H57 2002. On a label, it displays like:

LC call number

I have no questions about how the physical label should look – that part’s easy.

The label for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in ANSCR

But the catalog display is trickier. How should I separate each term? My options are, with links to example records of each:

• spaces
• dots
• slashes
• underscores
• dashes
• asterisks

A couple of these are fairly easy to eliminate. Slashes can look too close to I’s to some people, and hyphens are used already in case of multiple names (ie SCHUM-W for William Schuman or BACH-C for CPE Bach).

I want them to be easily distinguished from the Main Library’s LoC call numbers, but also readable. Which should I choose?