PREFATORY NOTE.

There are plenty of treatises on classification, of which accounts may be found in Edwards’s Memoirs of Libraries and Petzholdt’s Bibliotheca Bibliographica. The classification of the St. Louis Public School Library Catalogue is briefly defended by W. T. Harris in the preface (which is reprinted, with some additions, from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1870). Professor Abbot’s plan is explained in a pamphlet printed and in use at Harvard College Library, also in his “Statement respecting the New Catalogue” (part of the report of the examining committee of the library for 1863), and in the North American Review for January, 1869. The plan of Mr. Schwartz, librarian of the Apprentices’ Library, New York, is partially set forth in the preface to his catalogue; and a fuller explanation is preparing for publication. For an author-catalogue there are the famous 91 rules of the British Museum [1] (prefixed to the Catalogue of Printed Books, Vol. 1, 1841, or conveniently arranged in alphabetical order by Th. Nichols in his Handbook for Readers at the British Museum, 1866); Professor Jewett’s modification of them (Smithsonian Report on the Construction of Catalogues, 1852); Mr. F. B. Perkins’s further modification (in the American Publisher for 1869), and a chapter in the second volume of Edwards. [2] But for a dictionary-catalogue as a whole, and for most of its parts, there is no manual whatever. Nor have any of the above-mentioned works attempted to set forth the rules in a systematic way or to investigate what might be called the first principles of cataloguing. It is to be expected that a first attempt will be incomplete, and I shall be obliged to librarians for criticisms, objections, or new problems, with or without solutions. {4} With such assistance perhaps a second edition of these hints would deserve the title—Rules. [3]

[1] Compiled by a committee of five, Panizzi, Th. Watts, J. Winter Jones, J. H. Parry, and E. Edwards, in several months of hard labor.

[2] To these may now be added: Condensed rules for an author and title catalogue, prepared by the co-operation committee, A. L. A. (printed in the Appendix of the present Rules); F: B. Perkins’s San Francisco cataloguing (1884); C: Dziatzko’s Instruction für die Ordnung der Titel im alphabetischen Zettelkatalog der Univ. Bibliothek zu Breslau (1886), of which an adaptation by Mr. K. A: Linderfelt will shortly be published; Melvil Dewey’s Condensed rules for a card catalogue, with 36 sample cards (published in the Library notes, v. 1, no. 2, 1886, and reprinted as “Rules for author and classed catalogs;” with changes, additions, and a “Bibliography of catalog rules” by Mary Salome Cutler, Boston, 1888, and again as “Library School rules,” Boston, 1889); G. Fumagalli’s Cataloghi di biblioteche (1887); H: B. Wheatley’s How to catalogue a library (1889); and various discussions in the Library journal, the Neuer Anzeiger, and the Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen.

[3] In this second edition I have retained the discussions of principles of the first edition and added others, because it seems to me to be quite as important to teach cataloguers the theory, so that they can catalogue independently of rules, as to accustom them to refer constantly to hard and fast rules. The index, which will be published separately, has been enlarged so as to form an alphabetical or “dictionary” arrangement of the rules.

CONTENTS.

RULES
FOR A
DICTIONARY CATALOGUE.

No code of cataloguing could be adopted in all points by every one, because the libraries for study and the libraries for reading have different objects, and those which combine the two do so in different proportions. Again, the preparation of a catalogue must vary as it is to be manuscript or printed, and, if the latter, as it is to be merely an index to the library, giving in the shortest possible compass clues by which the public can find books, or is to attempt to furnish more information on various points, or finally is to be made with a certain regard to what may be called style. Without pretending to exactness, we may divide dictionary catalogues into short-title, medium-title, and full-title or bibliographic; typical examples of the three being, 1º, the Boston Mercantile (1869) or the Cincinnati Public (1871); 2º, the Boston Public (1861 and 1866), the Boston Athenæum (1874–82); 3º, the author-part of the Congress (1869) and the Surgeon-General’s (1872–74) or least abridged of any, the present card catalogue of the Boston Public Library. To avoid the constant repetition of such phrases as “the full catalogue of a large library” and “a concise finding list,” I shall use the three words Short, Medium, and Full as proper names, with the preliminary caution that the Short family are not all of the same size, that there is more than one Medium, and that Full may be Fuller and Fullest. Short, if single-columned, is generally a title-a-liner; if printed in double columns, it allows the title occasionally to exceed one line, but not, if possible, two; Medium does not limit itself in this way, but it seldom exceeds four lines, and gets many titles into a single line. Full usually fills three or four lines and often takes six or seven for a title.

The number of the following rules is not owing to any complexity of system, but to the number of cases to which a few simple principles have to be applied. They are especially designed for Medium, but may easily be adapted to Short by excision and marginal notes. The almost universal practice of printing the shelf-numbers or the class-numbers renders some of them unnecessary for town and city libraries.