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45 - Organising knowledge: cataloguing, classification and indexing in the modern library

from Part Seven - The Trade and its Tools: Librarians and Libraries in Action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Rodney Brunt
Edited by
Alistair Black  and
Peter Hoare
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Summary

The last century and

The last century and a half have seen massive change in the entire sphere of the organisation for retrieval of library stock and, as a consequence, in the tools designed to provide effective use of collections as well as in those developed to fashion the retrieval devices themselves.

The degree of change is perhaps most easily measured in the move from the manuscript or printed catalogue, geared to libraries where to a great extent the librarian himself was the index, to the hypertext online catalogues of the most modern kind now available via the Internet.

This chapter examines these tools in the context of development to meet changing needs of readers and library staff, under three main heads: cataloguing (i.e. the surrogate and its known-item indexing); the subject approach (via both physical and surrogate retrieval); and indexing in special libraries.

Cataloguing

Origins

It is generally accepted that the most important development in descriptive cataloguing was the construction, publication and first use of the Rules for the compilation of the catalogue of the printed books in the British Museum (BM). In 1839 Antonio Panizzi, in order to further his great enterprise of producing the general catalogue, established the ninety-one rules for the guidance of his cataloguers in making entries (the ‘titles’) for the guard-books which comprised the working version of the catalogue prior to printing.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland , pp. 568 - 583
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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