Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Third General Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Waukesha, Wisconsin, July 4-10, 1901
Science
Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Third General Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Waukesha, Wisconsin, July 4-10, 1901
American Library Association; Library science -- Congresses
Apropos of another report I had to make some time ago, I had heard that
the greatest library in this country, certainly in some respects, was
changing its plan to accommodate itself to the 33 card. I wrote to Mr.
Whitney, of the Boston Public Library, which as you know uses a card
larger than the 33, and it is a fact that with their immense catalog
running for so many years, and with so large a number of cards which
they cannot now cut down to the 33 size, they have found it advisable so
to modify their plan for titles henceforth that the cards may be cut
down to the 33 size on reprinting the old titles. Here is the letter,
the report from his cataloger. [Mr. Hopkins here read the letter.] If
they do not think it likely that ultimately they will use the 33 card
why should they take all that trouble? Now, the problem they had to deal
with was 10 times more difficult than that which the users of the 32
cards have to deal with. All you have to do with a 32 card to make it a
33 size is to paste it on something big enough and provide space to hold
it. With such evidence as this before us why should we fret ourselves to
provide a 32 card when the change to the 33 can be so easily and so
cheaply made?
Mr. BOWKER: May I add a word which Dr. Billings said to me? He said that
he preferred a printed catalog card to a written catalog card any time,
without reference to any question of uniformity. So he was actually
replacing his written catalog cards with the Library of Congress cards
or Library Bureau cards. I think that there is growing in the great
libraries a desire for some general method which will supply printed
catalog cards.
CHAIRMAN: Is there any further discussion on this topic? If not we will
pass to the next.
_Notes and Contents._ I read from the official report made by the
Committee on Rules to the Publishing Board: "The position of the
collation and series note to be on a separate line immediately after the
date and preceding other notes." Now we cannot take up the whole
question of notes, nor the question of the minority report which Mr.
Hopkins was asked to submit; but the question I would submit to you is
this: Is not the contents note really, logically, sensibly, a part of
the title? Is it not actually, in almost nine cases out of ten, more
important than the title itself? If it were not, would it not be
nonsense to print the contents note? If it is so, why separate the
contents note from the title by other relatively unimportant matter? Has
anybody anything to say?
Mr. HANSON: It seems to me it would be well to say here, collation is
used for pagination, illustrations, maps, plates, etc., and size. That
is the imprint, as we have for convenience's sake called collation; and
the idea is that this information is to be paragraphed, on a separate
line, so as to set out the date and make the date end the line in twelve
point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account