Library Trends

The fundamental principle of order in the library catalogue is the authorship principle, which serves as the organizing node of an alphabetico-classed system, in which "texts" of "works" are organized first alphabetically by uniform title of the progenitor work and then are subarranged using titles for variant instantiations, under the heading for an "author." We analyze case studies of entries from (1) the first documented imperial library catalogue, the Seven Epitomes (Qilue [七略]), in China; (2) Abelard's Works, which featured prominently in the 1848 testimony of Antonio Panizzi; and (3) The French Chef and the large family of instantiated works associated with it. Our analysis shows that the catalogue typically contains many large superwork sets. A more pragmatic approach to the design of catalogues is to array descriptions of resources in relation to the superwork sets to which they might belong. In all cases, a multidimensional faceted arrangement incorporating ideational nodes from the universe of recorded knowledge holds promise for greatly enhanced retrieval capability.