Library catalog


A library catalog 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 catalog for a group of libraries is also called a union catalog. A bibliographic item can be any information entity that is considered library material, or a group of library materials, or linked from the catalog as far as it is relevant to the catalog and to the users of the library.
The earliest library catalogs were lists, handwritten or enscribed on clay tablets and later scrolls of parchment or paper. As codices replaced scrolls, so too did library catalogs become like handwritten ledgers and, in some cases, printed books. During the late 18th century through mid-19th century, cataloguing on paper slips or cards gradually replaced ledgers and books as the main medium for library catalogs, and in the 20th it was long ubiquitous. The card catalog was a familiar sight to library users for generations. Computerized cataloguing developed gradually from the mid-20th, and by the late 20th and early 21st, it had mostly replaced card catalogs. The advent of the web brought about ubiquitous use of online public access catalogs. Some people still informally refer to the online catalog as a "card catalog".
The largest international library catalog in the world is the WorldCat union catalog managed by the non-profit library cooperative OCLC. In January 2021, WorldCat had over half a billion catalog records representing three billion library holdings.

Goal

in 1841 and Charles Ammi Cutter in 1876 undertook pioneering work in the definition of early cataloging rule sets formulated according to theoretical models. Cutter made an explicit statement regarding the objectives of a bibliographic system in his Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalog. According to Cutter, those objectives were
  1. to enable a person to find a book of which any of the following is known :
  2. * the author
  3. * the title
  4. * the subject
  5. * the date of publication
  6. to show what the library has
  7. * by a given author
  8. * on a given subject
  9. * in a given kind of literature
  10. to assist in the choice of a book
  11. * as to its edition
  12. * as to its character
These objectives can still be recognized in more modern definitions formulated throughout the 20th century.
Other influential pioneers in this area were Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan and Seymour Lubetzky.
Cutter's objectives were revised by Lubetzky and the Conference on Cataloging Principles in Paris in 1960/1961, resulting in the Paris Principles.
A more recent attempt to describe a library catalog's functions was made in 1998 with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, which defines four user tasks: find, identify, select, and obtain.
A catalog helps to serve as an inventory or bookkeeping of the library's contents. If an item is not found in the catalog, the user may continue their search at another library.

Card

A catalog card is an individual entry in a library catalog containing bibliographic information, including the author's name, title, and location. Eventually the mechanization of the modern era brought the efficiencies of card catalogs. It was around 1780 that the first card catalog appeared in Vienna. It solved the problems of the structural catalogs in marble and clay from ancient times and the later codex—handwritten and bound—catalogs that were manifestly inflexible and presented high costs in editing to reflect a changing collection. The first cards may have been French playing cards, which in the 1700s were blank on one side.
In November 1789, during the dechristianization of France during the French Revolution, the process of collecting all books from religious houses was initiated. Using these books in a new system of public libraries included an inventory of all books. The backs of the playing cards contained the bibliographic information for each book and this inventory became known as the "French Cataloging Code of 1791".
English inventor Francis Ronalds began using a catalog of cards to manage his growing book collection around 1815, which has been denoted as the first practical use of the system. In the mid-1800s, 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. In some libraries, books were cataloged based on the size of the book while other libraries organized based only on the author's name. This made finding a book difficult.
The first issue of Library Journal, the official publication of the American Library Association, made clear that the most pressing issues facing libraries were the lack of a standardized catalog and an agency to administer a centralized catalog. Responding to the standardization matter, the ALA formed a committee that quickly recommended the "Harvard College-size" cards as used at Harvard and the Boston Athenaeum. It also suggested that a larger card, approximately, would be preferable. By the end of the nineteenth century, the bigger card won out, mainly to the fact that the card was already the "postal size" used for postcards.
Melvil Dewey saw well beyond the importance of standardized cards and sought to outfit virtually all facets of library operations. To the end he established a Supplies Department as part of the ALA, later to become a stand-alone company renamed the Library Bureau. In one of its early distribution catalogs, the bureau pointed out that "no other business had been organized with the definite purpose of supplying libraries". With a focus on machine-cut index cards and the trays and cabinets to contain them, the Library Bureau became a veritable furniture store, selling tables, chairs, shelves and display cases, as well as date stamps, newspaper holders, hole punchers, paper weights, and virtually anything else a library could possibly need. With this one-stop shopping service, Dewey left an enduring mark on libraries across the country. Uniformity spread from library to library.
Dewey and others devised a system where books were organized by subject, then alphabetized based on the author's name. Each book was assigned a call number which identified the subject and location, with a decimal point dividing different sections of the call number. The call number on the card matched a number written on the spine of each book. In 1860, Ezra Abbot began designing a card catalog that was easily accessible and secure for keeping the cards in order; he managed this by placing the cards on edge between two wooden blocks. He published his findings in the annual report of the library for 1863 and they were adopted by many American libraries.
Work on the catalog began in 1862 and within the first year, 35,762 catalog cards had been created. Catalog cards were ; the Harvard College size. One of the first acts of the newly formed American Library Association in 1908 was to set standards for the size of the cards used in American libraries, thus making their manufacture and the manufacture of cabinets, uniform. For almost a century, the LOC printed and sold copies of its own catalog cards to libraries in the United States, reducing duplication of work in cataloguing across libraries. OCLC, a major supplier of catalog cards, printed the last one in October 2015.
In a physical catalog, the information about each item is on a separate card, which is placed in order in the catalog drawer depending on the type of record. If it was a non-fiction record, Charles A. Cutter's classification system would help the patron find the book they wanted in a quick fashion. Cutter's classification system is as follows:
  • A: encyclopedias, periodicals, society publications
  • B–D: philosophy, psychology, religion
  • E–G: biography, history, geography, travels
  • H–K: social sciences, law
  • L–T: science, technology
  • X–Z: philology, book arts, bibliography
Some libraries with OPAC access still have card catalogs on site, but these are now strictly a secondary resource and are seldom updated. Many libraries that retain their physical card catalog will post a sign advising the last year that the card catalog was updated. Some libraries have eliminated their card catalog in favor of the OPAC for the purpose of saving space for other use, such as additional shelving. The old cabinets are resold, as many people enjoy owning them for storage of personal effects in the home.

Types

Traditionally, there are the following types of catalog:
  • Author catalog: a formal catalog, sorted alphabetically according to the names of authors, editors, illustrators, etc.
  • Subject catalog: a catalog that sorted based on the Subject.
  • Title catalog: a formal catalog, sorted alphabetically according to the article of the entries.
  • Dictionary catalog: a catalog in which all entries are interfiled in a single alphabetical order. This was a widespread form of card catalog in North American libraries prior to the introduction of the computer-based catalog.
  • 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

The earliest librarians created rules for how to record the details of the catalog. By 700 BCE the Assyrians followed the rules set down by the Babylonians. The seventh century BCE Babylonian Library of Ashurbanipal was led by the librarian Ibnissaru who prescribed a catalog of clay tablets by subject. Subject catalogs were the rule of the day, and author catalogs were unknown at that time. The frequent use of subject-only catalogs hints that there was a code of practice among early catalog librarians and that they followed some set of rules for subject assignment and the recording of the details of each item. These rules created efficiency through consistency—the catalog librarian knew how to record each item without reinventing the rules each time, and the reader knew what to expect with each visit. The task of recording the contents of libraries is more than an instinct or a compulsive tic exercised by librarians; it began as a way to broadcast to readers what is available among the stacks of materials. The tradition of open stacks of printed books is paradigmatic to modern American library users, but ancient libraries featured stacks of clay or prepaper scrolls that resisted browsing.
As librarian, Gottfried van Swieten introduced the world's first card catalog as the Prefect of the Imperial Library, Austria.
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. 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 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.
When the printing press became well-established, 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. 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 toward the end of the 20th century the online public access catalog was developed. These gradually became more common as some libraries progressively abandoned such other catalog formats as paper slips, 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.
More about the early history of library catalogs has been collected in
1956 by Strout.