Both Bradford's and Garfield's laws are operative in the arrangement and use of library materials. Librarians have long known about the inadequacies of classification schemes. For example, Kelley (1937, 66–99) listed no less than 13 factors limiting the usefulness of any classification scheme for books. Among these factors, the most interesting were the following: the changing order of knowledge, which makes impossible the static perfection of any classification system; the inadequacy of any single linear representation of subject matter for expressing the variety of its relationships; the nature of systematic classification, which separates parts from the whole, and that sometimes results in forced and useless subdivisions; the tendency of students or specialists to organize subject matter around their own special and immediate interests; the content make-up of books, which interferes with the satisfactory application to books of any system of classification; and the general impracticality of reclassifying old books on any wide scale as new expansions and reconstructions of the classification system appear. Checking three simple concepts—beaver, buffalo, and cormorant—against the Library of Congress (LC) and Dewey Decimal classification schemes, Kelley found that only from 2.2% to 5.9% of the total material in a library on those subjects were found under their specific class number.

In a pioneer study, Fussler (1949) checked the citations made by chemists and physicists against the LC classification system. To obtain the citations for his study, he constructed subject cores of journals for the two disciplines by using the two key journals in each discipline—Journal of the American Chemical Society and Physical Review—and then selected the other journals for the cores from among those most cited by these key journals and located in the same LC class group—QD (Chemistry) and QC (Physics). For 1939, Fussler found that only 30.5% of titles cited by chemists were in QD, although 71.2% of the citations went to these journals, and that only 20.2% of the journals cited by physicists were classed in QC, although 63.1% of the citations were to these journals.

The rest of the titles and citations were spread out over other LC classes. Thus, 12.2% of the titles cited by chemists in 1939 were in QC, but these citations comprised only 6.5% of the chemists' total citations, whereas 10.4% of the titles cited by physicists in that year were in QD, although these citations were only 3.1% of the physicists' citations.

Fussler's findings with respect to chemistry were replicated by Hurd (1992), who compared the articles published by the chemistry faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago against the broad subject categories of the 27th edition of Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory. Hurd found that only 59.3% of these articles were published in journals classed by Ulrich's in chemistry and that only 47.4% of the references made in these articles were to journals classed in that same category.

An interesting approach to the relationship of the LC class groups to university departments was taken by McGrath, Simon, and Bullard (1979) at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL). They started out by utilizing the LC schedules to classify courses given at USL in 43 academic departments that granted bachelor's degrees, using a method developed by McGrath and Durand (1969). Of these 43 departments, 19 offered graduate degrees. With both books and students classified in the same manner, McGrath, Simon, and Bullard then used circulation data for academic years 1974–75 and 1975–76 to test whether and by how much student majors in the 43 subject areas were "ethnocentric"—i.e., used books in their own subject areas —and whether and by how much books in the 43 subject areas were "supportive"—i.e., used by students majoring in other subject areas.

Concerning the former characteristic, undergraduate music majors were the most ethnocentric, borrowing books from their own subject area 71.7% of the time, while undergraduate vocational education majors were the least ethnocentric, checking out no books in their subject area. The undergraduate ethnocentricity median was represented by French majors at 17.9%. Graduate students exhibited higher ethnocentricity, where again music majors were highest at 87.4%, while management majors were the lowest at 2.2%. The graduate ethnocentricity median was the 45.7% of computer science majors.

In terms of supportiveness of other programs at the undergraduate level, vocational education books were the highest, with 100.0% of them being checked out by nonmajors, and nursing books were the lowest, with only 24.7% being charged out to nonmajors. Applied arts books were at the undergraduate median of 81.6%. Supportiveness was lower at the graduate level. Management was highest at 98.5%, while computer science was lowest at 13.1%. The graduate supportiveness median was 55.2%, as seen in biology. These subject use patterns were fairly stable over the two-year period.

The techniques and concepts of McGrath, Simon, and Bullard (1979) were utilized by Metz (1983) in his study of external monographic circulation at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI). Metz obtained the main data for his study from a computer program run against the library database on May 24–25, 1982. The result was a snapshot of the books in circulation at that particular point in time. He also related academic departments to LC class groups, and he tested monographic use by the VPI faculty for ethnocentricity and supportiveness. Concerning ethnocentricity, the range ran from a high of 68.4% for the mathematics faculty to a low of 7.8% for the geography faculty. The median ethnocentricity of 14 subject groups was 38.9%, between the sociology faculty at 37.1% and the foreign language faculty at 40.7%. On a broad basis, the checkout rates were the following: for the humanities faculty—78.8% in the humanities, 12.0% in the social sciences, and 9.1% in science and technology; for the social sciences faculty—24.4% in the humanities, 64.1% in the social sciences, and 11.5% in science and technology; and for the science and technology faculty—8.9% in the humanities, 6.7% in the social sciences, and 84.3% in science and technology (Metz 1983, 66–69). As for faculty supportiveness, psychology materials were most supportive with a 96% supportiveness ranking, and classics materials were the least supportive with a 2% supportiveness ranking. The median supportiveness was 51%, as seen in library science. Of great import was Metz' finding (1983, 81) that knowledge of an undergraduate's major was significantly less predictive of the library materials the undergraduate would borrow than knowing the departmental affiliation of a faculty or graduate student.

Metz and Litchfield (1988) conducted another study of VPI library use in which they gathered monthly circulation data for each month from January through May 1987, and compared these data with the 1982 data. They found that the subject distribution of circulation patterns was remarkably stable over time for an institution not undergoing dramatic curricular change or extensive changes in the direction of library acquisitions.