070 - National Agricultural Library Call Number

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of five national libraries of the United States and houses one of the world's largest collections devoted to agriculture and its related sciences. It is part of the US Department of Agriculture and is located in Beltsville, MD (15 miles northeast of Washington, DC). The NAL works in a variety of program areas and maintains several interesting collections. You can search their collections through AGRICOLA.

The NAL uses tag 070 for its call numbers. Prior to 1965, NAL used a USDA library classification scheme. In 1965, NAL began using the Library of Congress Classification for all newly-cataloged materials. Both schemes are still used because some series title changes have been kept with the USDA scheme call number. This is why there is a need for a separate tag for the NAL call number even though it is usually the same as the LC number in the 050.

The structure of this tag parallels that of the 050 tag:

• subfield a is the classification portion of the call number
• subfield b is the item portion of the call number
• the first indicator tells you if the item is in the NAL collection
• the second indicator is undefined and will be blank