267. Co-operative Cataloguing.
267. Co-operative Cataloguing.—Efforts have been made from time to time to obviate the duplicating of cataloguing work that occurs all over the country, and in every country, and brief reference should be made to these. The principal is the Library of Congress card-distribution system, to which detailed reference has been made. In Great Britain various attempts have been made, but chiefly in the form of annotated and classified lists of new books, which it was expected that libraries would transfer to their own catalogues. Such lists were issued in The Library World in 1901, but were discontinued for lack of support. Later the Library Association issued such lists in The Library Association Record, but in recent years this work, which is still done by members of the Association, is published in the form of weekly lists in strict catalogue form (Decimal classified, and annotated) in The Athenæum; and The Librarian and Book Selector publishes monthly annotated lists which are classified by both the Decimal and Subject classifications. In America, The A. L. A. Book-List, The Wisconsin Library Bulletin, and The Ontario Library Review all provide similar lists. Any of the entries in all of these is suitable for cutting out and mounting on cards or slips for insertion in existing catalogues.
Other kinds of catalogue co-operation are those in which more than one library has joined in the issue of a catalogue to cover the stock of all in certain subjects. A small example was the Union Class-List of the Libraries of the Library and Library Assistants’ Association, 1913; and larger examples are the Classified Catalogue on Architecture, etc., in the Principal Libraries of Manchester and Salford, 1909, which was edited by Henry Guppy and Guthrie Vine for the Joint Architectural Committee of Manchester; and the Newcastle Classical Catalogue, 1912, which contains certain periodicals and books in the Armstrong College Library, as well as those in the Public Libraries. The most recent examples are series of class-lists on important subjects such as Internal Combustion Engines and Aeronautics, both 1918, issued by the Committee on Joint-Technical Catalogues, Glasgow, which bring together titles from the libraries of eighteen institutions in that city, indicating the location of the various books by abbreviations added to the entries, as:
Cassier’s Engineering Monthly. E. Kp. L. Ml. P. Pp. S. St. U.
Many schemes for a national central co-operative catalogue have been drawn up, and lie buried in the pages of library periodicals, until some future time when the benefits of such work will be realized and recognized in this country.
CHAPTER XIX
MECHANICAL METHODS OF DISPLAYING CATALOGUES
268.
268. We have dealt already with forms of catalogue to some extent, but the five chief methods of displaying manuscript catalogues merit a more detailed consideration and illustration. It is needless to attempt to describe every device which has been introduced for the purpose of displaying catalogues and providing for additions and expansion, and we shall limit our selection to those which are best known, most effective or most used. The five chief methods are the Page, Card, Sheaf, Placard and Panoramic, a nomenclature suggested in an article which appeared in 1893 in the Library, pp. 45-66.