CASE STUDY: Delicious call numbers

I worked in a small public library where someone had established a memorial
fund for us to buy cookbooks. We had hundreds of cookbooks
(which a library collection of our size wouldn't normally have.)

It was nice to be able to make the call numbers longer
and more detailed. So not only were all of the books on
Italian cooking together, they were even shelved by region!

641.5945 for General Italian Cooking
641.59455 for Tuscany
641.59458 for Sicily
and so on.

If our collection only had 10 Italian cookbooks, we would have just given them the general number 641.5945 for Italian Cooking because there wouldn't have been so many to look through. But our library users were able to browse our extensive collection knowing that all of the books on a particular type of cooking or region of cooking would be found together.

Doing this with your call numbers is great for another reason: some library catalog software lets you 'browse' by call number!
Once you find a book on Italian cooking, you click on the Dewey number
and the catalog lists all of the books under that number.
You can browse the Italian cookbooks from home, in your pajamas,
munching popcorn. Or eating tarallini.