Page 161 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Knowledge Organization: Classification and Cataloguing Theory

Notes However, the idea of specific subject entry was still in the process of making with insistence on
the use of standard terms in titles to indicate the subjects. The introduction of printed catalogue
card service in 1901 by the Library of Congress was yet another development.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
3. The ………………catalogues produced during the century marked a milestone and greatly
influenced the succeeding studies of cataloguing practice.

4. The introduction of printed catalogue card service in ……………..by the Library of Congress
was yet another development.

8.3 Need and Purpose of Library Cataloguing

Libraries generally acquire reading and reference material in various physical forms, which can
be utilized by users for study, reference, research, and other purposes. This reading and reference
material may also be procured in different physical forms such as printed documents, microfilms
or machine-readable forms, located and shelved at different place.
The primary purpose of a library catalogue is to serve as a guide to the collection of materials.
Basically, it reveals to the readers the document or non-document materials contained in the
library and aids them in finding out whether the materials of their interest are available in the
library or not. A library catalogue also serves as a key to the library collection as well as location
or as retrieval tool.

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 catalogue and for taking the time to correctly catalogue library materials.
The library catalogue 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
catalogue 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 cataloguing record provides the many access points needed by
the patron looking for information in the library. Traditionally, the library card catalogue
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 catalogues 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 Cataloguing)
in the 1960’s made it possible to encode all areas of a cataloguing record to be searchable. In
MARC cataloguing, each piece of information in a catalogue 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
cataloguing 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 cataloguing record.

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