What is the purpose of cataloging library materials?

Library collections house a wide variety of materials on many different topics and in many different formats. The challenge in making these things available for the use of library patrons is letting those patrons know what is in the library collection. This is the reason for having a library catalog, and for taking the time to correctly catalog library materials.

The library catalog might be compared to the index for a book.  The index provides the reader with a way to find information in the book without having to read every page.  The index tells the reader the page on which the information about a specific subject can be found.  The library catalog does the same thing.  It tells the library user exactly where materials meeting their specific needs can be found, with the call number of the book corresponding to the page number in an index.

The information contained in the cataloging record provides the many access points needed by the patron looking for information in the library. Traditionally, the library card catalog provided access by the author’s name, the title of an item, and the subject(s) covered in the item. Other points of access were additional authors, names of series, illustrators, and sometimes the titles of contents. 

Computer catalogs can, in theory, provide access to any part of the information contained in the record for an item in the library. The development of MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) in the 1960’s made it possible to encode all areas of a cataloging record to be searchable. In MARC cataloging, each piece of information in a catalog record is given a numerical code, or field, and sometimes an alphabetical or numerical sub field. This coding makes it possible for a computer program to be written that looks for particular numbered fields when a particular type of search, such as a subject or title, is requested. Because all of the information in the cataloging record is encoded, searches could optionally be done by ISBN number, by series, by publisher, by date; or by any of the pieces of information stored in the cataloging record. MARC has set the standard for all computer catalogs used in libraries today, and if the records contained in the catalog comply with MARC requirements, the only controls on areas to be searched are the limits of the particular cataloging program.

When library materials are cataloged in a careful and complete manner, access is provided for the library patrons and staff to all sources of information on a particular topic, by a particular author, or in a particular format, that the library possesses. The better the access, the more use the collection receives, and the more satisfied the patron is in his or her search for information in the library.

Definision of Catalogue

cat·a·log or cat·a·logue      n. 1. a. A list or itemized display, as of titles, course offerings, or articles for exhibition or sale, usually including descriptive information or illustrations. b. A publication, such as a book or pamphlet, containing such a list or display: a catalog of fall fashions; a seed catalog. 2. A list or enumeration: "the long catalogue of his concerns: unemployment, housing, race, drugs, the decay of the inner city, the environment and family life" (Anthony Holden). 3. A card catalog. v. cat·a·loged or cat·a·logued, cat·a·log·ing or cat·a·logu·ing, cat·a·logs or cat·a·logues v.tr. 1. To make an itemized list of: catalog a record collection. 2. a. To list or include in a catalog. b. To classify (a book or publication, for example) according to a categorical system. v.intr. 1. To make a catalog. 2. To be listed in a catalog: an item that catalogs for 200 dollars. [Middle English cathaloge, list, register, from Old French catalogue, from Late Latin catalogus, from Greek katalogos, from katalegein, to list : kata-, down, off; see cata- + legein, to count; see leg- in Indo-European roots.] cata·loger, cata·loguer n.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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cat•a•log (ˈkæt lˌɔg, -ˌɒg)

n.

1. a list or record, as of items for sale or courses at a university, systematically arranged and often including descriptive material.

2. something, as a book or pamphlet, that contains such a list or record.

3. a list of the contents of a library or a group of libraries, arranged according to any of various systems. Compare card catalog.

4. any list or record: a catalog of complaints.

v.t.

5. to enter (items) in a catalog; make a catalog of.

v.i.

6. to produce a catalog.

7. to have a specified price as listed in a catalog.

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.

Catalog card

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]

Sorting

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:

1. The online catalog does not need to be sorted statically
   
   
   ; the user can choose author, title, keyword, or systematic order dynamically.
2. Most online catalogs allow searching for any word in a title or other field, increasing the ways to find a record.
3. Many online catalogs allow links between several variants of an author's name.
4. 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.
5. Physical storage space is considerably reduced.
6. Updates are significantly more efficient.