The Literature of the Book: Libraries and Librarianship

LOGOS 15.3 CRC 9/30/04 9:15 AM Page 137

LOGOS The Literature of the Book: Libraries and librarianship

Michael Gorman All libraries in all places and periods select, acquire, and give access to library materials (books, maps, electronic resources, and all other carriers of recorded knowledge and information in all formats). They also organize, circulate, and preserve those carriers and give assistance and instruction in their use. There are hundreds of thousands of libraries of all kinds all over the Dean of Library Services at the world, each with their own mission, peculiarities, Henry Madden Library, California and communities to serve. They have three inter- State University, Fresno, since dependent things in common. Those three assets are the collections they own or to which they give 1988, Michael Gorman worked for access; the librarians and other staff who carry out the preceding eleven years at the the functions listed above; and the bibliographic University of Illinois, Urbana, architecture (catalogues, classifications, etc) that Library. From 1966 to 1977, he facilitate the use of the collections. Each of the three is vital to the work of a library. was, successively, a researcher at the All bibliographic essays that attempt to British National Bibliography, Head summarize a wide field of human endeavour in a of Cataloguing at BNB, a member of scant few pages are idiosyncratic, and this one may the British Library Planning be more idiosyncratic than most. Libraries have a long history (see the Lionel Casson book listed Secretariat, and Head of the Office below) and librarianship a history that is almost as of Bibliographic Standards at the long. Now, in the twenty-first century, there are British Library. Gorman is a past hundreds of thousands of libraries in the world and president of the Library and the librarians who work in them are as varied as Information Technology Association the fish in the sea and almost as numerous. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that there is a and was elected, in 2004, the vice- golden thread of values and mission that connects president/ president-elect of the a school librarian in California, a university American Library Association. librarian in Rome, a public librarian in Tower Email: [email protected] Hamlets, a special librarian in a research centre in Beijing, a government librarian in Australia, and a national librarian in Egypt, but there is no doubting that they differ in education, experience, and the communities they serve. This is a brief essay by a male librarian in his 60s who has worked in American academic libraries for nearly thirty years, in the British national library, and in London public libraries during the years before that. More,

Michael Gorman

my professional concentration has been on cata- Immroth’s Guide to the Library of Congress classi- loguing and classification and latterly in library fication.”) administration. Here, then, is one aged Anglo- The Library of Congress’ classification is used American librarian’s eye view of a wide and varied in almost all North American research libraries field. (though a few still use the intellectually superior Dewey Decimal Classification). Professor Chan’s Cataloguing and Classification guide to this haphazard structure seeks to describe The unique task of libraries and librarians is the its patterns and aids understanding of what is, for preservation of the human record. The unique all its shortcomings, an indispensable tool for the skill of librarians is the organization of that human scholarly library user. record in a global network using a sophisticated and complex bibliographic architecture that has FOSKETT, A C The Subject Approach to Informa- evolved over the last 200 years using the natural tion, 5/e, Library Association, London, 1996 languages of descriptive (name/title) cataloguing Antony Foskett’s textbook remains the best and subject headings and the artificial languages of and most readable description of the many ways in subject classification. which libraries supply subject access to their collections. It covers all major classification RANGANATHAN, S R Elements of Library Clas- schemes (LC, Dewey, Universal Decimal Classifi- sification, based on lectures delivered at the University cation, etc) and verbal subject heading lists, the of Bombay in December, 1944 N K Publishing best known of which in English is the Library of House, Poona, 1945 Congress List of Subject Headings. Foskett combines There are four great figures in Anglo-Amer- both the theoretical and practical applications of ican librarianship. An odd thing is that three of subject access and relates them to the wider world them were born far from the North Atlantic. For of information retrieval. Seymour Lubetzky, the Eastern European, and for Antonio Panizzi, the native of Modena, see below. BERMAN, Sanford Prejudices and Antipathies: A Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan (1892-1972), Tract on the LC Subject Heads concerning People, thought by many to be the greatest librarian of the Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1971 20th century, was a native of Madras, India. He Sandy Berman is the most successful revolu- made many contributions to what he named tionary figure in the field of cataloguing and classi- “library science,” among which were his “Five laws fication, an arena usually characterized by mildness of library science,” first published in Madras in and accommodation – neither of which are his 1931 and widely republished since. These lapidary strong suit. This book showed that subject headings laws are as relevant today as they were more than are not the neutral desiccated designations for seventy years ago. Dr Ranganathan’s principal area which they are usually taken, but expressions of a of interest in practical librarianship was in classifi- socio-political stance that, at the time of Berman’s cation, of which he was both an historian and a writing, represented a white, middle-class, sexist, scholar. His “Colon classification” was the first racially insensitive world view. The fact that, to a classification to be founded on scientific principles great extent, this is no longer the case is due in and has been hugely influential in classification great part to Berman the bomb-thrower turned sage. schemes throughout the world – notably the “Universal decimal classification,” used widely in LUBETZKY, Seymour Seymour Lubetzky: Writings Europe. This book (The elements) is an elegant on the Classical Art of Cataloging, compiled and and concise presentation of his thinking on the edited by Elaine Svenonius, Dorothy McGarry. topic. Libraries Unlimited, Englewood, Colorado, 2001 Seymour Lubetzky was born in what is now CHAN, Lois Mai A Guide to the Library of Congress Belarus in 1898. He died in Los Angeles in 2003 Classification, 5/e, Libraries Unlimited, Englewood, and remained actively involved in his professional Colorado, 1999 (“Based on the fourth edition of interests past his hundredth birthday. He was the