What Is a Library Catalogue?

A library catalogue is a comprehensive, organized list of a library's contents: It refers to maps, periodical archives, artwork, computer files, microfilm, and, of course, books. Library catalogues are limited to a particular library or a single group of libraries, but nearly all library catalogues today share the same basic search features and organization. After the advent of online catalogues in the '70s, physical card catalogues became nearly obsolete, but some libraries retain their card catalogues for decorative or commemorative purposes.

History

About the year 800, medieval Islamic libraries began to use catalogues to organize their books, sorting them by genre. The first printed catalogue on record is the Nomenclator of Leiden University Library, which came into use in 1595. In the 1920s, Melville Dewey developed the Dewey Decimal Classification system of library cataloguing, and by the end of the 1930s, his numerical system was implemented in almost every library in America.

Functional Objectives

In 1876, Charles Cutter defined the goals of a bibliographic catalogue in his Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalog. He stated that a person should be able to find a book knowing either the author, title, or subject; that the catalogue should show the user all books that a library owns by any given author, subject, or type of literature; and that it should be useful in guiding the user's choices regarding a book's edition and character. Cutter's goals have remained relevant up until the present day, although several groups have made updates. The latest definition of a catalogue's function comes from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, which states that a catalogue should enable four tasks: find, identify, select and obtain.

Card Catalogues

The first card catalogue was created in France around 1790, when wartime shortages forced the cataloguers to use confiscated playing cards as raw material. The Library of Congress began distribution of typewritten catalogue cards in 1901, but many librarians (including Melville Dewey) preferred handwritten cards. Three copies of every card went into a library catalogue: one to be sorted by author, one by title, and one by subject.

Online Catalogues

In the late 1960s, the Library of Congress created a catalogue format called Machine-Readable Cataloguing (MARC), which allowed for quicker processing of bibliographic records; that development led to Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs), which were considerably cheaper to maintain than physical catalogues and were thus quickly adopted by most libraries.

Contemporary Use

Today, online card catalogues feature dynamic, complex search functions; they can spell-check a user's mistakes, facilitate partial searches, and link variants of the same title or author names. Libraries regarded as having particularly good online catalogues include the Yale Law School Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the library at the University of California, Irvine.

Resources

• Most Innovative INNOPAC Sites