Cataloging and organizing library collections

When we read Battles chapter 5 this week "Books for All," there's a lot of emphasis on organizing and cataloging collections. Of course, if a library isn't organized  or organized well, as most home library collections are not, it's difficult to find that particular book you are looking for. The same is true for libraries. 

In the nineteenth century, library collections increased dramatically, to the point that a basic inventory was no longer useful or helpful. Various librarians developed systems for cataloging books, that is assigning numbers or codes through which a librarian and / or researcher could retrieve the book and subsequently like titles from the shelves. Classification by subject is part of the same process. How do you shelve or co-locate like titles together. 
That's what Melvil Dewey and Charles Ami Cutter,
John Shaw Billings http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/about/collectionhistory.html#A1 design for American libraries, and by mid twentieth century Henry E. Bliss did the same for British Libraries http://www.blissclassification.org.uk/bcbibliog.shtml . But earlier, monks and librarians organized there smaller collections, as we read in previous weeks.

We've already read about the earlier efforts. I think Battles does a good job of describing what and how Panizzi organizes, catalogs, and classifies the British Museum collections. Here's an interesting article about the Panizzi's 91 Cataloging Rules http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2426  Panizzi also designed the main reading room, the Round Reading Room at the British Museum http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/the_museums_story/reading_room.aspx Just a few decades later, we see these same organizing principles applied to US collections.

Now there are other reasons why someone might catalog a collection. If one is a collector of a certain author or genre, he might want to confirm that he owns all the books and works. Using a bibliography of that author's collected works, the collector can catalog or inventory against the bibliography entries and describe specific copies held in that collection. Such is the case of described by Jerry Morris as he organizes his Boswell collection for subsequent sale. Read all about it on his blog: A Sentimental Library  http://mysentimentallibrary.blogspot.com/2013/06/cataloguing-and-recataloguing-boswell.html