Geography and the Environment

You can find books at other BC Libraries by using Outlook Online.

 You can request a book from another institution using our interlibrary loan service. (note that interlibrary loan books can take up to 10 days to arrive).

Call numbers help you locate items in the library. You will always find related books shelved together so understanding call numbers can help you find many resources on the shelves.  Still confused about call numbers? Click here.

Library of Congress call number ranges for Geography are:

G      GIS, Remote Sensing, Analytical methods, Tourism, Maps & Atlases                

GA   Cartography, Surveys

GB    Physical Geography, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Glaciology

GC    Oceanography

GE     Environmental Sciences

HB    Population Geography, Demography  

HC     Economic Geography

HE     Transportation Geography

HQ    Population

HT     Urban Geography, Cities

JC     Political Geography

QC    Climatology, Meteorology

QH    Biogeography, Ecology

S       Soils, Forestry

TC- TD  Hydrology

The library subscribes to the Canadian Public Documents Collection    (CPDC) which contains almost 30,000 full-text, "born-digital" federal government and think tank publications (PDF's) from 2003 onward. CPDC is by no means a comprehensive source of government documents or other grey literature. It is, however, a good starting place for such publications. Here are a few things to bear in mind about the CPDC.

• • It only includes monographs, not series or periodicals. That means, for example, that publications such as the annual school rankings publication from the Fraser Institute will NOT be in the CPDC collection.

• • It has good coverage of federal government publications, but only selected provincial government items, and no local/municipal documents.

• • CPDC includes publications from a wide range Canadian public policy institutes, advocacy groups, think tanks, university research centres, and public interest groups. Here is more detail from the vendor:

[CPDC] offers access to selected Canadian “grey literature”. These reports from non-commercial publishers are freely available on the Web, but they are often difficult to collect and access without a tool like [CPDC].

The collection includes research papers, reports, studies, policy papers & briefs, discussion papers, numbered series, working papers, political party platforms, evidence reviews, systematic reviews, economic evaluations, and environmental scans. Coverage of annual reports is limited. Inclusion of technical reports is limited to health-related topics.

You can search the CPDC collection in two ways:

1)   Canadian Public Documents Collection

2)     Through Summon or the library catalogue

• • Every item in the CPDC collection has been added to our library catalogue so you will find them when searching in Summon or the classic library catalogue.