Cataloguing

Abstract

One of the dreams which have long inspired librarians concerns the desirability of reaching agreement on a set of cataloguing rules which would enable catalogue entries to be universally understood and used in modern cumulative catalogues. What was once a dream is becoming in the modern world with its ever growing stream of publications, its ever increasing libraries, its ever larger number of institutions devoted to the dissemination of literature and documentation, a matter of urgent practical importance. To every library time and effort expended on cataloguing constitute one of the greatest problems. Over and over again we have been surprised to find how much one new acquisition costs in time and money. It is therefere understandable that long searches have been made for ways in which the expensive work that is again and again done for the same books in thousands of different libraries might be centralised. True, there is a rather large number of instances of such centralisation in the world, which means a considerable relief of work and reduction in expense.