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Unit 6: Cataloguing
6.2 History Notes
Library catalogues originated as manuscript lists, arranged by format (folio, quarto, etc.) or in a rough
alphabetical arrangement by author. Printed catalogues, sometimes called dictionary catalogues
enabled scholars outside a library to gain an idea of its contents. These 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 catalogues appeared in the nineteenth century, enabling much more flexibility,
and towards the end of the twentieth century the OPAC was developed.
245 BC : Callimachus is considered the first bibliographer and is the one that organized
the library by authors and subjects. The Pinakes was the first ever library catalogue.
Variations on this system were used in libraries until the late 1800s when Melvil
Dewey developed the Dewey Decimal Classification in 1876, which is still in use
today.
800 : Library catalogues are introduced in the House of Wisdom and other medieval
Islamic libraries where books are organized into specific genres and categories.
1595 : Nomenclator of Leiden University Library appears, the first printed catalogue of
an institutional library.
1674 : Thomas Hyde’s catalogue for the Bodleian Library.
More about the early history of library catalogues has been collected in 1956 by Strout.
Cataloguing Rules
Cataloguing rules have been defined to allow for consistent cataloguing of various library materials
across several persons of a cataloguing team and across time. Users can use them to clarify how to
find an entry and how to interpret the data in an entry.
Cataloguing rules prescribe -> which information from a bibliographic item is included in the entry;
-> how this information is presented on a catalogue card or in a cataloguing record; -> how the
entries should be sorted in the catalogue. The larger a collection, the more elaborate cataloguing
rules are needed. Users cannot and do not want to examine hundreds of catalogue entries or even
dozens of library items to find the one item they need.
Currently, most cataloguing rules are similar to, or even based on, the International Standard
Bibliographic Description (ISBD), a set of rules produced by the International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions (IFLA) to describe a wide range of library materials.
These rules organize the bibliographic description of an item in the following areas: title and statement
of responsibility (author or editor), edition, material specific details(for example, the scale of a map),
publication and distribution, physical description (for example, number of pages), series, notes,
and standard number (ISBN). The most commonly used set of cataloguing rules in the English
speaking world are the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition, or AACR2 for short. In
the German-speaking world there exists the Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung,
abbreviated RAK. AACR2 has been translated into many languages, however, for use around the
world.
AACR2 provides rules for descriptive cataloguing only and does not touch upon
subject cataloguing.
Library items that are written in a foreign script are, in some cases, transliterated to the script of the
catalogue.
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