Search our library catalog to find books and ebooks purchased by the UC Berkeley Library, as well as those at all UC campuses (Use a proxy login if off-campus.)
Search WorldCat for books on your topic around the world, especially if doing a major literature review.
We use the Library of Congress system to shelve books by topic. When you find a book in the catalog, check which library it's in and write down its call number:
Books are shelved in alphabetical order (HM books before HQ books), and then in numeric order (31 before 308). Sociology is diverse, and so we have several main groupings:
| HM | Sociology (general) |
| HN | Social history & conditions, Social problems, Social reform |
| HQ | The family, Marriage, Women |
| HS | Societies: secret, benevolent, etc. |
| HT | Communities, Classes, Races |
| HV | Social pathology, Social & public welfare, Criminology |
The library has purchased access to a wide range of sociology e-books for your use. Nearly all are subscription-based 
and require you to be on campus / to login to your CalNet account to access:
Proquest ebooks can be read online, or download for 1-14 day loans. (You can permanently save some unrestricted books depending on the publisher's agreement).
Project Muse and JSTOR ebooks slant to the humanities; download and save chapters to read later.
Springer and Science Direct ebooks tend towards the sciences, and can often be downloaded and saved permanently.
Taylor & Francis ebooks are a mix of lending and permanent downloads.
UC Press and ACLS Humanities ebooks allow online reading only.
Proquest Dissertations and Theses is a good place to find detailed research not yet published as a book.
Google Books and HathiTrust have digitized thousands of Berkeley books, which you can download if not in copyright.
Every book in our catalog has several "subject" headings which describe its main topic. Samples:
Subjects and keywords are different. Search by "keyword" to find matching words in any title, author, subject, or book description. Search by "subject" to find books cataloged in a specific area--then click on the subject link to find similar books! Here are some subject headings which will give you good results for topics in sociology
Always cite your sources! These lists of call numbers and subject headings for finding sociology books come from librarian Kathleen Collins at the University of Washington