Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: sources and methodologies for the history of libraries in the modern era
- 1 Libraries and the modern world
- Part One Enlightening the Masses: the Public Library as Concept and Reality
- Part Two The Voluntary Ethic: Libraries of our Own
- Part Three Libraries for National Needs: Library Provision in the Public Sphere in the Countries of the British Isles
- Part Four The Nation's Treasury: Britain's National Library as Concept and Reality
- Part Five The Spirit of Enquiry: Higher Education and Libraries
- Part Six The Rise of Professional Society: Libraries for Specialist Areas
- Part Seven The Trade and its Tools: Librarians and Libraries in Action
- 39 Introduction: librarians and libraries in action
- 40 The interpretation of professional development in librarianship since 1850
- 41 Education for librarianship
- 42 Women and Libraries
- 43 The feminisation of librarianship: the writings of Margaret Reed
- 44 Sharing the load: libraries in co-operation
- 45 Organising knowledge: cataloguing, classification and indexing in the modern library
- 46 Storehouses of knowledge: the free library movement and the birth of modern library architecture
- Part Eight Automation Pasts, Electronic Futures: the Digital Revolution
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
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
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: sources and methodologies for the history of libraries in the modern era
- 1 Libraries and the modern world
- Part One Enlightening the Masses: the Public Library as Concept and Reality
- Part Two The Voluntary Ethic: Libraries of our Own
- Part Three Libraries for National Needs: Library Provision in the Public Sphere in the Countries of the British Isles
- Part Four The Nation's Treasury: Britain's National Library as Concept and Reality
- Part Five The Spirit of Enquiry: Higher Education and Libraries
- Part Six The Rise of Professional Society: Libraries for Specialist Areas
- Part Seven The Trade and its Tools: Librarians and Libraries in Action
- 39 Introduction: librarians and libraries in action
- 40 The interpretation of professional development in librarianship since 1850
- 41 Education for librarianship
- 42 Women and Libraries
- 43 The feminisation of librarianship: the writings of Margaret Reed
- 44 Sharing the load: libraries in co-operation
- 45 Organising knowledge: cataloguing, classification and indexing in the modern library
- 46 Storehouses of knowledge: the free library movement and the birth of modern library architecture
- Part Eight Automation Pasts, Electronic Futures: the Digital Revolution
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
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 - 583Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006