University of the Philippines Diliman

School of Library and Information Studies

LIS 60 Assignment 1
Organization of Information

Date: 11 February 2020

Based from the article by Strout (1956) titled “The Development of the Catalog and Cataloging
Codes”, make a timeline of the development of the catalog and cataloging codes. Follow the
format below:

2000 BC: The oldest list of books found in Nippur was made on a Sumerian tablet; relics of
catalogs or book listings were believed to have existed but not discovered yet.

1400 BC: The Babylonia’s Amarna clay tablets, once excavated from Egyptian libraries, had
shown significance in using identification tags attached to books or cases.

650 BC: The use of colophon became evident in the city of Nineveh, with thousands of tablets
from Ashurbanipal’s library utilizing it to convey bibliographical information.

250 BC: Callimachus, a scholar of Alexandria, compiled his Pinakes, a bibliographic work based
upon the catalog of the Alexandrian library which is believed to be the first library catalog.

822-824 AD: The library at Reichenau in Germany compiled a lot of catalogs where lists of gifts
and valuable books were included; only one was held responsible for its arrangement and
classification.

831 AD: The Benedictine house of St. Requier compiled several catalogs using author entries to
record number of volumes in a work; primarily served as an inventory with 246 volumes.

1247: The library of Glastonbury Abbey supplemented unusual descriptions such as “useless”
(inutiles) and “old” (vetusli) to aid in designating books according to its physical condition.

1327: Exeter Cathedral’s list employed the concept of shelf lists, where books are arranged by
numbered sections of the library and subdivided by numbered shelves, providing fixed location;
the list recorded the opening words of each volume together with price.

1372: Augustinian friars sought for a radical departure from the customary means of
identification to a more classified arrangement; the writings of the author and its subject were
separated and the opening words of the second leaf of each volume were added.

1389: The library from St. Martin’s Priory at Dover came up with a better approach of
designating a catalog into three sections: call number, paginated content, and analytical entries
and alphabetical listing.

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1394: The Trinity Hall of Cambridge’s college library listed a sparse collection of its book
collections containing entries accompanied with Latin equivalents deemed useful for the
librarian, but little use for students.

1410-1412: John Boston of Bury discovered the unfinished work of the Registrum librorum
Angliae that compiled most of the holdings of English monastery libraries and he continued and
revised the quite modernized manner of assigning code numbers to each library; cross-
referencing brought few innovations to catalogs after Amplonius Ratnick de Berka’s efforts on
his compilation of catalogs.

1494: Johan Tritheim, a German bibliographer and librarian, developed a new approach of
compiling a bibliography in chronological order and adding an alphabetical author index in a
classified catalog.

1545: Konrad Gesner of Zurich, a Swiss bibliographer and naturalist, wrote a publication of his
author bibliography, whereas, he observed that using forenames of authors caused inconvenience
among patrons; hence, adding a prefixed list of authors in which names were invented and cross-
references to the main listing.

1548: Following his Pandectarum instructions for the arrangement of books in a library, Gesner
proposed that libraries should provide both an author and a subject catalog to each entry.

1558: The library at the Priory of Bretton in Yorkshire made a small catalog of medieval style,
with added entries including the names of editors and translators.

1560: Florian Trefler, a Benedictine monk, published a treatise which argued the difficulty of
finding information in libraries due to books being kept unorganized and later on, devised an
advanced scheme of classification and call numbers that paved way to having a five-part catalog
which provides more than one means of access to a book.

1595: An English bookseller of his time, Andrew Maunsell, on his Catalogue of English Printed
Books, suggested his rules of uniform entry in which a patron should be able to find a book
according to the author’s surname, the subject, and the translator.

1627: Gabriel Naude progressive led the publishing of various discourses on librarianship,
particularly stressing the importance of cataloging and shelf arrangement.

1650: John Dury published his treatise on cataloging and suggested for printing of supplements
to catalogs every year, cataloging selectively, and dealing with unwanted gifts from acquisitions.

1697: Evaluation has been highly valued after the request of Bodlein curators to library staffs for
a feedback concerning its strengths and room for improvement in terms of organizing
information.

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1698: Frederic Rostgaard made contributions on the configuration of a library catalog where
chronological and by-size-of-volume subject arrangement were highly considered and made
achievement for his invention of a printed catalog.

1700: Sir Thomas Bodley, an English diplomat of Oxford University Library, insisted upon an
arrangement of alphabetical author index by surname, together with the inclusion of analytical
entries.

1791: The first instance of a national code in cataloging was made possible after the French
government mandated all libraries in France for cataloging their collection; the use of card
catalogs and collation of collections became prominent tasks among in-house personnel.

1827: Rev. Thomas Hartwell Horne stressed the importance of a classified catalog from his
published classification scheme and a code of cataloging rules submitted to libraries and
museums in England.

1836: After his appointment as an extra-assistant librarian in 1831, Anthony Panizzi became the
the focal person of a hearing where the state of cataloging in British Museum had been being
examined by the select committee appointed by the House of Commons.

1839: Being the “Keeper of the Printed Books” by his time, Panizzi made contributions on the
development of catalog and cataloging codes through his famous 91 rules; one of the
characteristics of his code was the occasional use of form headings as main entry.

1847: Furthermore, the committee resumed the investigation of the British Museum and
Panizzi’s 91 rules; whereas, few of the spokespersons criticized his code for those reasons that
the rules caused delays to the production of catalogs.

1849: The idea of cataloging as more than an inventory and merely finding list was born out of
Earl of Ellesmere’s conviction in a hearing where he emphasized that each book, regardless of
uniformity and language, should be catalogued under the form of name appearing on the title.

1850: Charles Jewett’s brief rules for catalogs marked the rising development of cataloging
among libraries in the United States; he made extensions in including the corporate author
without using any intervening form headings and considering authorship to each entry.

1876: Charles Cutter strengthened the concept of organizing units besides pointing out a catalog
to an individual publication; he entered authors who used pseudonyms under their real name and
rejected the use of form headings for main entries.

1893: William Coolidge Lane of Harvard made a report on the state of cataloging; whereas, he
claimed that certain rules on cataloging had been agreed by libraries.

1904: Mr. Lane reported again in an international meeting in Louisiana, where he asserted that
codes had achieved simplicity and were possible for further revisions.

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Using this work for profit and changing the work in any way without proper attribution are highly prohibited.