Susan Woods's List: ancient cataloging

• The NTA defines peer tutoring as trained student tutors assisting other students  who are within close proximity of the tutor's grade and age. The research  clearly demonstrates that Peer Tutoring is academically effective and costs  significantly less to oversee than private practice or other professionally  driven tutoring programs. With additional research indicating that approximately  7,000 high school students per day drop out of school, the need for peer tutors  cannot be overlooked any longer. Peer tutors are a valuable and viable resource  just waiting to be tapped.

• THE COLLECTION OF  written knowledge in some sort of repository is a practice as old as  civilization itself. About 30,000 clay tablets found in ancient Mesopotamia date  back more than 5,000 years. Archaelogists have uncovered papyrus scrolls from  1300-1200bc in the ancient Egyptian cities of Amarna and Thebes and thousands of  clay tablets in the palace of King Sennacherib, Assyrian ruler from 704-681bc,  at Nineveh, his capital city. More evidence turned up with the discovery of the  personal collection of Sennacherib's grandson, King Ashurbanipal.
  
  The name for the repository eventually became  the library. Whether private or public, the library has been founded, built,  destroyed and rebuilt. The library, often championed, has been a survivor  throughout its long history and serves as a testament to the thirst for  knowledge.
  
  
• Though the public library first appeared by the fourth century bc, the private  library was more prevalent. Aristotle, for instance, amassed a large private  collection. Ancient geographer Strabo said Aristotle "was the first to have put  together a collection of books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to  arrange a library."
  

• The history of the card  catalog begins in Paris during the time of the French Revolution and ends in  Dublin, Ohio in the 1970s. The purpose of the card in bibliographic cataloging has not changed during  the years as much as the format of the card. The most intriguing cards were  those that were handwritten by trained librarians. Handwritten cards were replaced first by  typewritten cards, then purchased cards, then online catalogs. Today there are few libraries that still use card  catalogs and many young library users that  do not know what a card catalog was or what it looked like.

     

  Contents [hide]
• The original purpose of the card as a cataloging tool was to aid in material  retrieval by the user, to make access points available from the descriptions on  the card, to determine the title, author and subject of the work, and to establish authority control.
• In a 1935 publication the card catalog is defined as “A catalogue, in any  desired order, made on cards of uniform size and quality, and stored on their  edges in drawers, each card being restricted to a single entry.” (Sharp 1935, 301)

  • In our text it credits Dewey with standardizing the size of the card.
• The concept and creation of the first cards used for catalogs occurred in France  around 1789. “The Constituent Assembly confiscated books and manuscripts and  were brought to literary depots at several locations in Paris. The staff at each  depot was to record on cards the basic particulars about each item held. These  cards were then bound up in bundles and sent to the Paris Bureau de  Bibliographie.” (Jackson 1974, 275) Because of wartime shortages, confiscated  playing cards were used to record the information. Playing cards were larger and  instead of having a pattern or a picture, were blank on the back. “The title page was to be transcribed  on the card and the author’s surname underlined for the filing word. If there  was no author, a keyword in the title  was to be underlined. A collation  was added that was to include number of volumes, size, a statement of illustration, the material of  which the book was made, the kind of type, any missing pages, and a description of the binding if it was outstanding in any way. (This  elaborate collation was partly for the purpose of identifying valuable books  that the government might offer for sale in order to increase government  revenue.) After the cards were filled in and put in order by underlined filing  word, they were to be strung together by running a needle and thread through the  lower left hand corners to keep them in order.”

2 more annotations...

• Library catalogs originated as manuscript lists, arranged by format (folio, quarto, etc.) or in a rough  alphabetical arrangement by author. Printed catalogs, sometimes called  dictionary catalogs 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 catalogs appeared in the nineteenth century,  enabling much more flexibility, and towards the end of the twentieth century the  OPAC was developed (see below).

• Cataloging (or cataloguing) rules have been defined to allow for consistent  cataloging of various library materials across several persons of a cataloging  team and across time. Users can use them to clarify how to find an entry and how  to interpret the data in an entry. Cataloging rules prescribe

   
   
  • which information from a bibliographic item is included in the entry;  
  • how this information is presented on a catalog card or in a cataloging  record;  
  • how the entries should be sorted in the catalog.
   

  The larger a collection, the more elaborate cataloging rules are needed.  Users cannot and do not want to examine hundreds of catalog entries or even  dozens of library items to find the one item they need.

• For at least one hundred years, catalogers have been committed to  creating perfect bibliographic records of their local resources for their local  users.
• In truth, however, those individuals responsible for cataloging books in  medieval libraries faced many of the same challenges as catalogers today: how to  organize information, how to serve local needs, and how to provide access to  individual works within larger bibliographic formats.

• The complexity of cataloging manuscripts, particularly medieval manuscripts, has  meant that these materials have remained largely inaccessible to the public. The  quantity and quality of the descriptive data, the time and money it takes to  catalog manuscripts, and the fragility of the materials themselves explain the  dearth of searchable data on these valuable resources. Even when manuscripts  have been cataloged, they have often been physically available only to a few  elite scholars who are able to gain access to them. Certain institutions have  embarked on projects to reverse this situation.