The practical reason is, that you eliminate the chief disturbing elements of a catalogue. The catalogue of ordinary books, if well made in the first instance, requires little alteration, and needs only additions; but the catalogue of serials, by the very nature of its contents, wants continued change.
Some librarians who have followed the British Museum rules continue the terms adopted there of Academies and Periodical Publications; but I think the headings Transactions and Journals are in every way preferable. The word Academy is entirely foreign to our habits, and most of those academies which exist here are institutions quite distinct from societies which publish transactions. Almost the only exception to this rule is the Royal Irish Academy. Even abroad, societies are more numerous than academies.[32] With respect to the heading Periodical Publications, it may be said that transactions would logically come as properly under it as journals and magazines, because all are published periodically.
This subject of the arrangement of periodicals has not been treated of so exhaustively as it deserves. Mr. J. B. Bailey communicated a paper on "Some Points to be Considered in Preparing Catalogues of Transactions and Periodicals" to the Library Association of the United Kingdom in February 1880,[33] in which he affirms that so little agreement is there among cataloguers, that the three most recent catalogues of scientific transactions and periodicals then published were arranged on different plans. The three catalogues referred to were (1) Catalogue of Scientific Serials, 1633-1876, by S. H. Scudder, Cambridge, U.S., 1879; (2) Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, London, 1879; (3) Catalogue of the Library of the Museum of Practical Geology and Geological Survey, London, 1878.
At the Cambridge Meeting of the Library Association, 1882, I communicated a paper entitled "Thoughts on the Cataloguing of Journals and Transactions." In this paper I discussed some of the open questions respecting their arrangement, and these points I may recapitulate here. Mr. Bailey is in favour of Mr. Scudder's union of journals and transactions in one catalogue, but he is not so satisfied that the plan of arranging these under the names of the places of publication adopted by that bibliographer is the best.
The two chief questions which arise, after we have settled the point that these serials shall be kept distinct from the general alphabet, are these:—
(1) Shall journals and transactions be treated as one and the same class, or shall they be arranged in separate alphabets?
(2) If journals and transactions are kept distinct, how shall they be arranged?
I.
Mr. Scudder, as already mentioned, treats journals and transactions as one and the same class, and arranges both together, according to a combined geographical and alphabetical system. This is, I think, an inconvenient arrangement for a catalogue, for the following reason: Transactions are nearly always known by the names of the places where they are issued, but journals are not known by the name of the place of publication. For instance, suppose a reader comes to the librarian for the Jahrbuch of the Physikalischer Verein, the librarian would naturally ask, Which one of these societies? and the reader might answer Frankfort; but if the Canadian Journal were required it is probable that neither reader nor librarian would remember whether it were published at Toronto or at Montreal. The society of its very nature has a local habitation, while the journal has a name, but is not necessarily associated with the place where it is published. It therefore follows that if the titles of the two kinds of periodicals are arranged on different systems, it will be better to keep them distinct than to unite them in one alphabet. In the British Museum Catalogue the two classes are kept distinct, but both are arranged under the names of places, so that they might quite as well have been united in one alphabet. The reason for separation entirely depends, it seems to me, upon the difference of arrangement adopted for each.