Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue / U. S. Bureau of Education Special Report on Public Libraries—Part II, Third Edition

This applies very slightly to entries under first words, because it is easy and sufficient to arrange them by the alphabet.

There is such confusion in the use of terms in the various prefaces to catalogues—a confusion that at once springs from and leads to confusion of thought and practice—that it is worth while to propose a systematic nomenclature.

Strictly a book is not anonymous if the author’s name appears anywhere in it, but it is safest to treat it as anonymous if the author’s name does not appear in the title.

Note that the words are “in the title,” not “on the title-page.” Sometimes in Government publications the author’s name and the title of his work do not appear on the title-page but on a page immediately following. Such works are not anonymous.

Books are classified by bringing together those which have the same characteristics. [6] Of course any characteristics might be taken, as size, or binding, or publisher. But as nobody wants to know what books there are in the library in folio, or what quartos, or what books bound in russia or calf, or what published by John Smith, or by Brown, Jones, and Robinson, these bases of classification are left to the booksellers and auctioneers and trade sales. Still, in case of certain unusual or noted bindings, as human skin or Grolier’s, or early or famous publishers, as Aldus and Elzevir, a partial class-list is sometimes very properly made. But books are most commonly brought together in catalogues because they have the same authors, or the same subjects, or the same literary form, or are written in the same language, or were given by the same donor, or are designed for the same class of readers. When brought together because they are by the same author, they are not usually thought of as classified; they form the author-catalogue, and need no further mention here except in regard to arrangement. The classes, i. e., in this case the authors, might of course be further classified according to their nations, or their professions (as the subjects are in national or professional biographies), or by any other set of common characteristics, but for library purposes an alphabetical arrangement according to the spelling of their names is universally acknowledged to be the best.

The classification by language is not generally used in full. There are catalogues in which all the English books are separated from all the foreign; in others there are separate lists of French books or German books. The needs of each library must determine whether it is worth while to prepare such lists. It is undeniably useful in almost any library to make lists of the belles lettres in the different languages; which, though nominally a classification by language, is really a classification by literary form, the object being to bring together all the works with a certain national flavor—the French flavor, the German flavor, or it may be a classing by readers, the German books being catalogued together for a German population, the French for the French, and so on. Again, it is useful to give lists not of the belles lettres alone, but of all the works in the rarer languages, as the Bodleian and the British Museum have published separate lists of their Hebrew books. Here too the circumstances of each library must determine where it shall draw the line between those literatures which it will put by themselves and those which it will include and hide in the mass of its general catalogue. Note, however, that some of the difficulties of transliterating {10} names of modern Greek, Russian authors, etc., are removed by putting their original works in a separate catalogue, though translations still remain to puzzle us.

The catalogue by donors or original owners is usually partial (as those of the Dowse, Barton, Prince, and Ticknor libraries). The catalogues by classes of readers are also partial, hardly extending beyond Juvenile literature and Sunday-school books. Of course many subject classes amount to the same thing, the class Medicine being especially useful to medical men, Theology to the theologians, and so on.

Classification by subject and classification by form are the most common. An example will best show the distinction between them. Theology, which is itself a subject, is also a class, that is, it is extensive enough to have its parts, its chapters, so to speak (as Future Life, Holy Spirit, Regeneration, Sin, Trinity), treated separately, each when so treated (whether in books or only in thought) being itself a subject; all these together, inasmuch as they possess this in common, that they have to do with some part of the relations of God to man, form the class of subjects Theology. Class, however, is applied to Poetry in a different sense. It then signifies not a collection of similar subjects, but a collection of books resembling one another in being composed in that form and with that spirit, whatever it is, which is called poetical. In the subject-catalogue class it is used in the first sense—collection of similar subjects; in the form-catalogue it is used in the second—list of similar books.

Most systems of classification are mixed, as the following analysis of one in actual use in a small library will show:

Confining ourselves now to classification by subjects, the word can be used in three senses:

1. Bringing books together which treat of the same subject specifically.

That is, books which each treat of the whole of the subject and not of a part only.

2. Bringing books together which treat of similar subjects.

Or, to express the same thing differently:

  Bringing subjects together so as to form a class.

A catalogue so made is called a classed catalogue.

3. Bringing classes together so as to form a system.

A catalogue so made should be called a systematic catalogue.

The three steps are then

• 1. Classifying the books to make subject-lists.
• 2. Classifying the subject-lists to make classes.
• 3. Classifying the classes to make a systematic catalogue.

The dictionary stops in its entries at the first stage, in its cross-references at the second.

The alphabetico-classed catalogue stops at the second stage.

The systematic alone advances to the third.

Classification in the first sense, it is plain, is the same as “entry;” in the second {11} sense it is the same as “class-entry;” and in the third sense it is the same as the “logical arrangement” of the table on p. 12, under “Classed catalogue.”

It is worth while to ascertain the relation of subject and class in the subject-catalogue. Subject is the matter on which the author is seeking to give or the reader to obtain information; Class is, as said above, a grouping of subjects which have characteristics in common. A little reflection will show that the words so used partially overlap, [7] the general subjects being classes [8] and the classes being subjects, [9] but the individual subjects [10] never being classes.

E. g., a book on repentance has class entry under Theology; its specific entry would be under Repentance.

A dictionary catalogue contains class-headings, inasmuch as it contains the headings of extensive subjects, but under them there is no class entry, only specific entry. The syndetic dictionary catalogue, however, recognizes their nature by its cross-references, which constitute it in a certain degree an alphabetico-classed (not a systematic) catalogue. Moreover, the dictionary catalogue, without ceasing to be one, might, if it were thought worth while (which it certainly is not), not merely give titles under specific headings but repeat them under certain classes or under all classes in ascending series, e. g., not merely have such headings as Rose, Geranium, Fungi, Liliaceæ, Phænogamia, Cryptogamia, but also under Botany include all the titles which appeared under Rose, Geranium, etc.; provided the headings Botany, Cryptogamia, Fungi, etc., were arranged alphabetically. The matter may be tabulated thus: