Product Synopsis

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1885. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... XV. A LIBRARIAN'S "WORK. I AM very frequently asked what in the world a librarian can find to do with his time, or am perhaps congratulated on my connection with Harvard College Library, on the ground that, "being virtually a sinecure office (!), it must leave so much leisure for private study and work of a literary sort." Those who put such questions, or offer such congratulations, are naturally astonished when told that the library affords enough work to employ all my own time, as well as that of twenty assistants; and astonishment is apt to rise to bewilderment when it is added tbat seventeen of these assistants are occupied chiefly with "cataloguing;" for generally, I find, a library catalogue is assumed to be a thing that is somehow "made" at a single stroke, as Aladdin's palace was built, at intervals of ten or a dozen years, or whenever a "new catalogue " is thought to be needed. "How often do you make a catalogue?" or, "When will your catalogue be completed?" are questions revealing such transcendent misapprehension of the case that little but further mystification can be got from the mere answer, " We are always making a catalogue, and it will never be finished." The " doctrine of special creations," indeed, does not work any better in the bibliographical than in the zoological world. A catalogue, in the modern sense of the term, is not something that is "made" all at once, to last until the time has come for it to be superseded by a new edition, but it is something that "grows," by slow increments, and supersedes itself only through gradual evolution from a lower degree of fulness and definiteness into a higher one. It is perhaps worth while to give some general explanation of this process of catalogue-making, thus answering once for all the question as to...