What is Catalogue
A library
catalog (or library catalogue) is a register of all bibliographic
items found in a library
or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A
bibliographic item can be any information entity (e.g., books, computer files,
graphics, realia, cartographic materials, etc.) that
is considered library material (e.g., a single novel in an anthology),
or a group of library materials (e.g., a trilogy),
or linked from the catalog (e.g., a webpage) as far as it is relevant to the
catalog and to the users (patrons) of the library.
The card catalog
was a familiar sight to library users for generations[vague], but it has been[when?]
effectively replaced by the online public access catalog (OPAC). Some
still refer to the online catalog as a "card catalog". Some libraries
with OPAC access still have card catalogs on site, but these are now strictly a
secondary resource and are seldom updated. Many of the libraries that have
retained their physical card catalog post a sign advising the last year that
the card catalog was updated. Some libraries have eliminated their card catalog
in favour of the OPAC for the purpose of saving space for other use, such as
additional shelving.
Goal
Charles Ammi Cutter made the first explicit
statement regarding the objectives of a bibliographic system in his Rules for a
Printed Dictionary Catalog in 1876. According to Cutter, those
objectives were
1. to enable a
person to find a book of which either (Identifying objective)
- the author
- the title
- the subject
- the category
is known.
2. to show what the
library has (Collocating objective)
- by a given
author
- on a given
subject
- in a given
kind of literature
3. to assist in the
choice of a book (Evaluating objective)
- as to its
edition (bibliographically)
- as to its
character (literary or topical)
These objectives
can still be recognized in more modern
definitions formulated throughout the 20th century. 1960/61 Cutter's
objectives were revised by Lubetzky and the Conference on Cataloging Principles
(CCP) in Paris. The latest attempt to describe a library catalog's goals and
functions was made in 1998 with Functional
Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) which defines four
user tasks: find, identify, select, and obtain.
A catalog also
serves as an inventory
or bookkeeping
of the library's contents. If an item (a book) is not found in the catalog, the
user may continue her search at another library. Library
thieves, who may be staff or regular visitors of the library, risk
discovery if an item listed in the catalog is missing from the shelves. To
reduce this risk, a thief may also steal the catalog card describing the item.
A catalog card is
an individual entry in a library catalog. The first cards used may have been
French playing cards, which, in the 1700's, were blank on one side.[2]
In the mid-1800's, Natale Battezzati, an Italian publisher,
developed a card system for booksellers in which cards represented authors,
titles and subjects. Very shortly afterward, Melvil Dewey
and other American librarians began to champion the card catalog because of its
great expandability. One of the first acts of the newly-formed American Library
Association in 1876 was to set standards for the size of the cards used in
American libraries, thus making their manufacture and the manufacture of
cabinets, uniform.
In a physical catalog
the information about an each item is on a separate card, which is placed in
order in the catalog drawer depending on the type of record. Here's an example
of a catalog card, which would be filed alphabetically in the Author section:
Arif,
Abdul Majid.
Political structure in a changing
Pakistani
village / by Abdul Majid Arif and
Basharat Hafeez
Andaleeb. -- 2nd ed. --
Lahore : ABC Press, 1985.
xvi, 367p. : ill. ; 22 cm.
Includes index.
ISBN
969-8612-02-8
Types
Traditionally, there
are the following types of catalog:
- Author catalog: a formal catalog, sorted
alphabetically according to the authors' or editors' names of the entries.
- Title catalog: a formal catalog, sorted alphabetically according to the
article of the entries.
- Dictionary catalog: a catalog in which all entries (author, title, subject,
series) are interfiled in a single alphabetical order. This was the
primary form of card catalog in North American libraries just prior to the
introduction of the computer-based catalog[citation needed].
- Keyword catalog: a subject catalog, sorted alphabetically according to some
system of keywords.
- Mixed
alphabetic catalog forms: sometimes, one finds a mixed author / title, or
an author / title / keyword catalog.
- Systematic catalog: a subject catalog, sorted according to some systematic
subdivision of subjects. Also called a Classified catalog.
- Shelf list catalog: a formal catalog with entries sorted in the same order as
bibliographic items are shelved. This catalog may also serve as the
primary inventory for the library.
History
During the early
modern period, libraries were organized through the direction of the librarian
in charge. There was no universal method, so some books were organized by
language or book material, for example, but most scholarly libraries had
recognizable categories (like philosophy, saints, mathematics). The first
library to list titles alphabetically under each subject was the Sorbonne
library in Paris. ?
Library catalogs originated as manuscript lists, arranged by format (folio,
quarto, etc.) or in a rough alphabetical arrangement by author. Before
printing, librarians had to enter new acquisitions into the margins of the
catalog list until a new one was created. Because of the nature of creating
texts at this time, most catalogs were not able to keep up with new acquisitions.[3]
It was not until the printing press was well-established that strict cataloging
became necessary because of the influx of printed materials. Printed catalogs,
sometimes called dictionary catalogs, began to be published in the early
modern period and enabled scholars outside a library to gain an idea of its
contents.[4]
Copies of these in the library itself would sometimes be interleaved with blank
leaves on which additions could be recorded, or bound as guardbooks in
which slips of paper were bound in for new entries. Slips could also be kept
loose in cardboard or tin boxes, stored on shelves. The first card catalogs
appeared in the late 19th century after the standardization of the 5 in. x 3
in. card for personal filing systems, enabling much more flexibility, and
towards the end of the 20th century the Online public access catalog was
developed (see below). These gradually became more common as some libraries
progressively abandoned such other catalog formats as paper slips (either loose
or in sheaf catalog form), and guardbooks. The beginning of the Library of
Congress's catalog card service in 1911 led to the use of these cards in the
majority of American libraries. An equivalent scheme in the United Kingdom was
operated by the British
National Bibliography from 1956[
and was subscribed to by many public and other libraries.
- c. Seventh
century BCE, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal
established a royal library at Nineveh, off of the Tigris River. His
30,000 clay tablets were organized according to shape, and they were
separated by content into different rooms. This library had one of the
first catalogs.
- 9th century:
Libraries of Carolingian schools and monasteries employ library catalog
system to organize and loan out books.[6][7][8]
- c. 10th
century: The Persian city of Shiraz's library had over 300 rooms and
detailed catalogs to help locate texts, which covered every topic.[9]
- c. 1246:
Library at Amiens Cathedral in France
uses call numbers associated with the location of books.[10]
- c. 1542-1605:
The Mughul
emperor Akbar was a warrior, sportsman, and famous cataloger. He organized
a catalog of the Imperial Library's 24,000 texts, and he did most of the
classifying himself.[11]
- 1595: Nomenclator
of Leiden University Library
appears, the first printed catalog of an institutional library.
- 1674: Thomas
Hyde's catalog for the Bodleian Library.
- 1791:The
French Cataloging Code of 1791
- 1815: Thomas Jefferson sells his personal
library to US government to establish the Library of Congress. He had organized
his library by adapting Francis
Bacon's organization of knowledge, specifically using Memory,
Reason, and Imagination as his three areas, which were then broken down
into 44 subdivisions.
More about the
early history of library catalogs has been collected in 1956 by Strout.[12]
In a title catalog,
one can distinguish two sort orders:
- In the grammatical
sort order (used mainly in older catalogs), the most important word of the
title is the first sort term. The importance of a word is measured by
grammatical rules; for example, the first noun may be defined to be the
most important word.
- In the mechanical
sort order, the first word of the title is the first sort term. Most new
catalogs use this scheme, but still include a trace of the grammatical
sort order: they neglect an article (The, A, etc.) at the beginning of the
title.
The grammatical
sort order has the advantage that often, the most important word of the title
is also a good keyword (question 3), and it is the word most users remember
first when their memory is incomplete. However, it has the disadvantage that
many elaborate grammatical rules are needed, so that only expert users may be
able to search the catalog without help from a librarian.
In some catalogs,
persons' names are standardized, i. e., the name of the person is always
(cataloged and) sorted in a standard form, even if it appears differently in
the library material. This standardization is achieved by a process called authority
control. An advantage of the authority control is that it is easier
to answer question 2 (which works of some author does the library have?). On
the other hand, it may be more difficult to answer question 1 (does the library
have some specific material?) if the material spells the author in a peculiar
variant. For the cataloguer, it may incur (too) much work to check whether Smith,
J. is Smith, John or Smith, Jack.
For some works,
even the title can be standardized. The technical term for this is uniform title.
For example, translations and re-editions are sometimes sorted under their
original title. In many catalogs, parts of the Bible are sorted under the
standard name of the book(s) they contain. The plays of William Shakespeare are
another frequently cited example of the role played by a uniform title
in the library catalog.
Many complications
about alphabetic sorting of entries arise. Some examples:
- Some
languages know sorting conventions that differ from the language of the
catalog. For example, some Dutch
catalogs sort IJ as Y. Should an English catalog follow this
suit? And should a Dutch catalog sort non-Dutch words the same way? (There
are also pseudo-ligatures which sometimes come at the
beginning of a word, such as Œdipus.
See also collation
and locale.)
- Some titles
contain numbers, for example 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Should they be sorted as numbers, or spelled out as Two thousand and
one? (Book-titles that begin with non-numeral-non-alphabetic glyphs
such as #1 are similarly very difficult. Books which have diacritics
in the first letter are a similar but far-more-common problem; casefolding
of the title is standard, but stripping the diacritics off can change the
meaning of the words.)
- de Balzac, Honoré or Balzac, Honoré de? Ortega y Gasset, José or Gasset,
José Ortega y? (In the first example, "de Balzac" is the
legal and cultural last name; splitting it apart would be the equivalent
of listing a book about tennis under "-enroe, John Mac-" for
instance. In the second example, culturally and legally the lastname is
"Ortega y Gasset" which is sometimes shortened to simply
"Ortega" as the masculine lastname; again, splitting is
culturally incorrect by the standards of the culture of the author, but
defies the normal understanding of what a 'last name' is—i.e. the final
word in the ordered list of names that define a person—in cultures where
multi-word-lastnames are rare. See also authors such as Sun Tzu,
where in the author's culture the surname is traditionally printed first,
and thus the 'last name' in terms of order is in fact the person's
first-name culturally.)
For a fuller
discussion, see collation.
In a subject
catalog, one has to decide on which classification system to use. The
cataloguer will select appropriate subject headings for the bibliographic item
and a unique classification number (sometimes known as a "call
number") which is used not only for identification but also for the
purposes of shelving, placing items with similar subjects near one another,
which aids in browsing by library users, who are thus often able to take
advantage of serendipity in their search process.
Online
catalogs
People working in Card Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1910s or
1920s Online cataloging,
through such systems as the Dynix
software[13]
developed in 1983 and used widely through the late 1990s,[14]
has greatly enhanced the usability of catalogs, thanks to the rise of MARC
standards (an acronym for MAchine Readable Cataloging) in the 1960s.
Rules governing the
creation of MARC catalog records include not only formal cataloging rules such
as AACR2
(Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition)[ but also rules
specific to MARC, available from both the U.S. Library of Congress and the OCLC, the Online Computer
Library Center global cooperative which builds and maintains WorldCat.
MARC was originally
used to automate the creation of physical catalog cards, but its use evolved
into direct access to the MARC computer files during the search process.
OPACs have enhanced usability over
traditional card formats because:
- The online
catalog does not need to be sorted statically
; the user can choose author,
title, keyword, or systematic order dynamically.
- Most online
catalogs allow searching for any word in a title or other field,
increasing the ways to find a record.
- Many online
catalogs allow links between several variants of an author's name.
- The
elimination of paper cards has made the information more accessible to
many people with disabilities, such as the visually impaired, wheelchair
users, and those who suffer from mold allergies or other paper- or
building-related problems.
- Physical
storage space is considerably reduced.
- Updates are
significantly more efficient.