ACTIVITY # 1

Read the article and answer the questions below.

How has the catalogue developed from the ancient world until the 21st Century?

The writer and bibliophile Alberto Manguel maintains that “the subjects or categories
into which a library is divided not only change the nature of the books it contains (read
or unread), but also in turn are changed by them. The catalogue form has been one of
the tools for organizing knowledge.

The term library to refer to “a collection of graphic materials arranged for

relatively ease of use, cared for by an individual or individuals familiar with that
arrangement, and accessible to at least a limited number of persons” (Harris 1995, 1).
In this sense, it is safe to say that historically catalogues were physical and intellectual
tools for (proto) librarians to record holdings and find items, as much as they are today,
but took different forms and structures at various historical moments depending on the
technology available and the purposes they served. The most basic distinction to be
made is between catalogues for internal use – collection inventories or shelf lists – and
catalogues for external users. The former aimed at keeping a record of the existing
stock (and often its location, too), the latter were conceived as a way to ‘advertise’ the
collection and became more prominent once libraries developed into centers of study
and not mere repositories for preservation (and reproduction) of knowledge (Hannah
2017, 45). I believe this basic distinction still holds today, when any software for library
information management presents at least two interfaces of the catalogue, one for
library users to search the collection (and locate or download items), and one for
librarians to manage it (i.e. purchase, accession, discard items etc.). The developments
of information technology, especially in recent years, have however afforded library
catalogues an unprecedented sophistication turning them into very powerful intellectual
tools. So when did humans start cataloguing?
Among the most ancient civilizations of the Western canon, in Mesopotamia and
Egypt, archaeologists have found evidence of early record collections. Although little of
the fragile materials used in Egyptian libraries (papyrus and then parchment) has
survived, circumstantial evidence suggests that systems of organization of their
contents were in place; on the other hand, the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians
have left behind abundant material. Clay tablets have been found containing lists (of
gods, professions, incantations, geographical names), but also letters, commercial and
family records, mythological narratives, hymns, laws, glossaries etc. Systems of storing,
preserving and retrieving these documents are well attested: one of the earliest
examples of clay catalogues from the Sumerian city of Ur from some 5,000 years ago,
listed key words from the first two lines of a hymn to identify its tablet; among the
Akkadians, who replaced the Sumerians and built their first libraries around 2200 BC,
the clay catalogue contained instead the incipit for a single group of tablets. In
Mesopotamia, documents were held in palaces or temples and fulfilled administrative,
religious, and scholarly purposes. Among the first librarians we know of, was the
Babylonian Amilanu, who lived approximately in 1700 BC: Babylonian libraries were
open to all and users were handed a piece of papyrus to write their names on and the
title of the material they wished to see, so that the librarian would fetch it for them.
This experience was not one that library users in Mesopotamia would have been
familiar with, as self-fetching and browsing was not an option and the kind of catalogue
they could rely on was typically a classified or classed catalogue, that is, a catalogue
arranged by subject according to the classification system in place in each specific
library. In the famous library of Nineveh, established by the King Ashurbanipal (ca. 669-
631 BC), the sizeable collection was organized by subject in separate rooms. The
tablets were kept in jars and arranged on wooden shelves in a systematic order, with
each tablet numbered and for multi-tablet works, each tablet presented the first line of
the whole work as well as the first line of the succeeding tablet; related works were held
together in a basket, whose tablet-tag contained an indication of the set, the jar, the
shelf and the room. Outside each room, an early form of catalogue (also on clay)
displayed a list of its contents: title of works, opening words, number of tablets each
consisted of, and location symbol. Although Mesopotamia lays claim to the first libraries
of antiquity, evidence suggests that Egypt also had some as old and similarly arranged
its papyrus rolls according to content. The oldest surviving library catalogue has
effectively been discovered at the temple library of Edfu in Upper Egypt (early 3rd
century BC) and it consists of a list of books engraved on the walls of the library itself. It
is also known that rolls were kept in chests where a tablet or a pictorial representation
on their cover indicated the books contained in them.
The fully-fledged library catalogue of antiquity comes into existence at the
famous library of Alexandria in Egypt, the first example of a universal library whose
purpose was to acquire all the available knowledge and attract major writers, scholars,
etc. to make it the center of learning. The poet Callimachus compiled a classified
catalogue consisting of 120 rolls. It was made on slips of papyrus called Pinakes
(‘tables’), where a short title was written which corresponded to the label on the
appropriate papyrus roll. The main divisions of the catalogue comprised Epic writers,
Dramatic writers, Writers on Law, Philosophical writers, Historical writers, Oratorical
works, Rhetorical works, Miscellaneous works, and each was further subdivided, with
entries arranged either in alphabetical order by author, or chronologically. This
additional bio-bibliographical work earns Callimachus the title of first bibliographer.
In Medieval time, catalogues were usually shelf lists or inventories compiled to
record holdings (and donations) and they listed books in order of importance starting
with the scripture and ending with secular literature. They did not normally indicate the
exact location of the book as they were not intended for readers’ use. The most
important innovation of the medieval period were union catalogues, lists that indicated
the holdings of several libraries (usually monastic ones and in relative proximity from
one another). They emerged in different European countries and allowed the
preservation and circulation of texts through loans for copying (Lerner 2002, 95).
Modern union catalogues are today online databases: the largest is WorldCat, which
brings together over 10,000 libraries worldwide, but national (and international) versions
are now common in many countries.
The printed library catalogue was not a real advancement on the codex format used in
previous centuries as, once published, it was already out of date. It was therefore soon
dismissed or slow to appear. As Campbell explains this prompted two innovations: one
was the slip catalogue, produced by William Croswell for the Library at Harvard College
in the 19th century. The idea, already mentioned by Gessner, consisted in cutting up the
printed catalogue from 1790 into slips, and pasting them into blank volumes called
guard-books, with spaces left between them for new entries. The other innovation was
the card catalogue, which made its appearance at the end of the 18th century when
playing cards were used by Edward Gibbon to catalogue his library. Blank cards
became common in the 1870s partly following Melvil Dewey’s innovations in
classification and professionalization of librarianship, which included fittings and
stationery. Card catalogues consist of an author catalogue and a subject catalogue,
arranged in alphabetical order (sometimes as one physical object sometimes as two
separate ones). They were widely adopted by university libraries and public libraries
worldwide.
In modern times the ever increasing size of the collections and the growth of user
numbers forced libraries to rethink their approach to the organization of and access to
knowledge. The need for standardization of cataloguing practices became increasingly
pressing and some important efforts developed in the 18th and 19th centuries informed
modern practices for the libraries taken over during the Revolution, Antonio Panizzi’s
“91 Rules” devised in the 1830 for the printed book collection of the British Museum.
Panizzi’s efforts at the British Museum was a further step forward: he aimed at
presenting readers not just with what they were looking for, but also with new
information (further editions, related versions, translations). This shift prompted
librarians to think about principles and methodologies to organize the catalogue in a
way that suited users’ needs and a century after the field was teaming with initiatives to
standardize cataloguing rules.
The arrival of automation, by far the most momentous innovation for the
catalogue, promoted a flurry of initiatives both in Europe and in the US and fostered
further collaboration. The pioneering work of Henriette Avram for the Library of
Congress produced the standardized machine-readable cataloguing (MARC) in the mid-
60s and MARC records began to be shared by the end of the decade. In the 1970s the
efforts of the International Federation of Library Associations resulted in UNIMARC, a
similar system but tailored on the needs of European libraries. The standards to encode
authoritative forms of name for authors so that, regardless of spelling, users would find
them, to encode information about series, or subjects, or editions etc. have been
variously updated over the years (for ex. AACR2) and so has the metadata used by the
software to cross reference between records, for example, or to instantly retrieve
records (MARC is now in its 21st version). In the Anglo-American world, these
standards are slowly being replaced: BIBFRAME (Bibliographic Framework), a system
that, by using linked data, aims to appeal also to users outside the library community, is
seen as a replacement for MARC21, and AACR2 has already been replaced by RDA
(Resource Description and Access) and an enhanced model that should allow for more
flexible search and display, FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records),
is the next likely successor. The latest technological challenge faced by the catalogue
has been the Web. As Faulkner laments: “our catalogue is locked inside an arcane
format, unable to talk to the Web, and unable even to give a good imitation of the Web
behaviour […] Library catalogues travelled one road and the Internet took another.”  The
gap between the two systems can perhaps be breeched by the Semantic Web, a new
way of encoding information in software so that it can read information encoded in web
pages. But this is still an ongoing project. In the meantime, the new ‘discovery tools’
adopted by some major libraries (usually national and academic libraries) have made
the single-search option of the library catalogue’s holdings from the integrated library
system (ILS) a reality. And so not only books, but also e-books, articles, e-journals,
audiovisual resources etc. can be found in a single search.

Questions:
1. Catalogue form exist since ancient times up to the present. It is considered as
one of the tools in organizing knowledge. Why?
2. Who devised “91 Rules”? What was his aim in creating this devise?
3. Describe the most important innovation during the medieval period.
4. Describe Melvil Dewey’s contribution in the librarianship profession specifically in
cataloging and classification.
This will be the format of your answer.
Name:

Answer:
File name should be: ACTIVITY-1 – YOUR FAMILY NAME