Where do you shelve journals that start with initials or acronyms, like the CA Magazine or VSE Business Report?

Usually, we shelve our journals alphabetically by title. However, when a journal title starts with initials, it's hard to know whether this is real word or name or an acronym and where to find it in the shelving order.

Look up the title of the journal in the Library catalogue. If the first word is a sequence of capital letters (all upper case), it will be shelved as initials, at the beginning of that letter of the alphabet before any of the journals that begin with words. For example, VSE Business Report will shelve before Vacation Marketing. The labels on the shelves in the Print Journal area match the titles in the catalogue.

The only exceptions are those journals filed under the name of the association publishing the journal. In these cases there is a note in the record that this title is "shelved under" a different name, for example, the Journal of the American Medical Association (also known as JAMA) has a SHELVED UNDER note in the record to say it's shelved as "American Medical Association. Journal".

In the case of record titles that include punctuation, these are treated as a space, with the exception of "&" which is treated as if it's "and" and apostrophes, which are ignored as if the word ran together. Numbers in titles are spelled out, for the purposes of shelving.