The Library World Volume 39 Issue 8

Abstract

IT is very appropriate that this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD should be devoted to the subject of cataloguing. This has become current in a special degree owing to the activity of the A.L.A. and the L.A. committees on both sides of the Atlantic, who are engaged in reviewing the Anglo‐American Code of Cataloguing Rules. Cataloguing is a subject that figures more in the minds of candidates for examinations than it does in the average conversations of librarians, but there is no more important subject in the librarian's life and no more significant activity. Our readers may not accept the implications of the somewhat vigorous “Letters on Our Affairs” which appear in this number, but it could be urged that there are many things to consider in cataloguing which have immediate importance. The matter was a simple one in former days. Forty years ago every library in this country of any size found it possible to issue a printed catalogue of some sort or other. The objections to these printed catalogues are commonplace to‐day; they were expensive, their cost was not recovered by sales, and they were incomplete from the beginning. The point is that libraries somehow managed to publish them, and those libraries were, as our correspondent suggests, of as good service to literature in its best sense as are present libraries.

Citation

(1937), "The Library World Volume 39 Issue 8", New Library World, Vol. 39 No. 8, pp. 177-200. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009196