A document may exist which holds the exact information you are looking for, but if you’ve no way to find it, it may as well not exist at all. The starting point of all cataloguing then, is to record a description of a document (and I’m using that term in its broadest sense here) and index it in such a way as to be discoverable and lead you to the information sought (either the document, or perhaps even the information contained in the description itself (the metadata). This is a simple enough notion which I found important to bear in mind as DITA delved into databases, semantic relationships, markup languages and all other sorts of exciting (but to begin with a little baffling!) concepts and standards.
A brief bit of history
Image credit: Klaus Wagensonner
Many early collections of tablets were small enough that to browse was to find what you were looking for. The first catalogues were simple, usually listing tablets by the opening lines of the work, for example:
“If a man’s breathing becomes difficult”;
“If a man’s chest is sick”;
And so on; their main use was as inventory.
These examples are from the 7th/8th century catalogue tablet pictured above. This tablet is also of interest as it attempts to classify subject knowledge, as explained in the entry on the The Cuneiform Digital Archive Initiative. See https://cdli.ucla.edu/cdlitablet/showcase (scroll down or search ‘Highlights 125’ if you’d rather not get distracted, though the other entries and the site in general is well worth a browse when you have time).
The next driver of change in cataloguing was volume, as collections grew so did the need to keep track of them. In 1290, The Sorbonne library introduced alphabetical order into the catalogue in the organisation of its substantial (for the time) collection of several thousand items (Battles 2003).
Use of subjects, author-title and physical description all came to be introduced in various ways over the next few hundred years, but the basis of 20th century cataloguing in the West arrived in the form of Anthony Panizzi’s “Ninety-One Cataloging Rules” (1841) which he created to assert control over the collection at The British Museum Library (Lehnus 1972). These rules were subsequently adopted in the US at The Smithsonian Institute, the start of internationalization of cataloguing rules (pp. 18 Jewett 1853).
The 19th and 20th centuries brought new forms of document, for example photographs, film and audio recordings which saw cataloguing rules revised to provide systems with which to adequately describe them; Anglo-American, ALA, and then AACR and AACR2 in the late 1960s to 70’s. And so then came computers, and catalogue records could be stored, produced and eventually searched more quickly with their application, however records had to be made machine-readable in order to do this; achieved by the introduction of MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) and its descendants.
As technology moved on, description of digital formats also needed to be incorporated, but the greater need for change by this point was in the fact that the way information was being stored and retrieved had fundamentally changed to the digital; new models of data were required.
Data models
Data models are independent of any specific set of cataloguing rules or formats. AACR(2) was not based on a formal data model but its replacement RDA took advantage of the FRBR entity-relation model, this allows for the description of relationships between entities by RDA (e.g. ‘work’ was created by ‘person’) not possible with AACR(2).
Another model, RDF seeks to model the relationships between elements of metadata, and by assigning each a Unique Resource Identifier, makes possible the ‘linked data’ required to fulfill W3C’s aspiration of the ‘Semantic Web‘.
As well as a choice of data models, there are now many different metadata standards tailored to the descriptive need of a collection, to get some idea of the scale take a look at a list provided by The Digital Curation Centre (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/metadata-standards/list).
Final thoughts
Rules, models and metadata standards have all evolved in order to meet the descriptive needs of new forms of document and to take advantage of innovations in information technology.
But however it is technically achieved, adding metadata in a considered, standardized way adds value and discoverability to the original ‘document’ data, which is the purpose of resource description (cataloguing).
Good use of metadata also allows for the creation of new information out of old. Patterns and ideas can be found when data can be found and put to good use, (for examples see the British Library’s labs pages (https://www.bl.uk/projects/british-library-labs) and it’s the metadata that enables that initial finding.
I feel I will be making sense of the technical aspects of metadata creation and use covered in the last few weeks for many more weeks to come, but I am satisfied to have understood more fully the purpose of description and confirmed my feeling that far from being a thing of the past, the principles of cataloguing are still very much at the heart of information organization for the future.
References & links
Battles, M. (2004) Library: An unquiet history. London: Vintage.
Collection Metadata Standards at The British Library http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/catstandards.html
The Cuneiform Digital Archive Initiative https://cdli.ucla.edu/cdlitablet/showcase
The Digital Curation Centre Metadata standards list (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/metadata-standards/list).
Jewett, C. (1853) ‘Smithsonian report on the construction of catalogues of libraries, and their publication by means of separate, stereotyped titles. With rules and examples’ Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47865/47865-h/47865-h.htm (Accessed 9th November 2019)
Lehnus, D. (1972) ‘A comparison of Panizzi’s 91 rules and the AACR of 1967′, University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science Occassional Papers No. 105 December 1972. Available at: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/3872/gslisoccasionalpv00000i00105.pdf?sequence=1 (Accessed 9th November 2019)
Library adjacent 🐝 
Great read. Yes – the fundamentals of cataloguing shall continue on as we delve further into the digital age. As long as user needs demand things to be found we will continue to create tagging systems and etc to adequately satisfy these needs.
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