You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Panizzi died in 1879 and did not live to see the completion of his catalog, but its compilation was governed to the end by the rules he had written. The first printed version of the catalog came out between 1881 and 1900. The General Catalogue of Printed Books, known by the shorthand GK—the job that the trustees thought would be a simple clerical task, completed in a few years—ended up occupying 393 volumes, with another 44 in the Supplement added between 1900 and 1905.14 GK2, bringing the original up to date, covered only the early parts of the alphabet, but GK3 covered holdings through 1955, and The British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books to 1975 in 360 volumes, published between 1979 and 1987, with six supplements in the late 1980s, brought it up to date. GK now abides in the ether with 57 million items, far more than even Panizzi could have imagined: the library had just a quarter million volumes when he started, and more than half a million when he died.

  GK has been called “a research tool of undisputed importance for historians of European civilisation from the invention of printing to the present day,”15 and every major catalog since has been indebted to Panizzi. “Panizzi’s ‘91 Rules,’ ” wrote K.G.B. Bakewell, “marked the beginning of the modern era of cataloguing.”16

  Even the best library catalogs from Callimachus to Panizzi and beyond share one major drawback: they are library catalogs, not libraries’ catalogs. What if someone needs a book but does not know who owns a copy? Once, the searcher would have had to check library after library. The thirteenth century, though, sees the birth of a new reference genre, the “union catalog,” which brings together the holdings of several libraries. The abbey of Savigny in Normandy, for instance, compiled a catalog not only of the library in Savigny, but of those in four nearby Benedictine abbeys.17 English Franciscan monks likewise assembled the Registrum Angliae de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum, a list of works by roughly a hundred authors, with notes on which English and Scottish monastic libraries owned them.18

  The union catalog took a great leap forward early in the fifteenth century, when a monk—usually identified as Boston Buriensis, or John Boston of Bury—put together a Catalogus scriptorum ecclesiae covering 195 libraries in English monasteries. He listed 674 authors, and he used the books of the Bible as an organizing principle—under each book came a list of the authors who had written about it, as well as a list of English libraries where the curious could find the books.19 These manuscript catalogs were necessarily of limited use because they were not widely available. In print, though, they became accessible to a large audience, and the first great printed union catalog came in 1545, when Conrad Gesner devoted years to his Bibliotheca universalis in 1545, covering around ten thousand books by some three thousand authors.20

  TITLE: The National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints: A Cumulative Author List Representing Library of Congress Printed Cards and Titles Reported by Other American Libraries

  ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical by author, A to Zzays, Jgo Wan

  PUBLISHED: London: Mansell, 1968–81

  VOLUMES: 685 + 69 vols. supplement

  PAGES: 528,000

  ENTRIES: 11.6 million

  TOTAL WORDS: 580 million

  SIZE: 13¾″ × 10¼″ (35 × 26 cm)

  AREA: 510,000 ft2 or 11.8 acres (48,000 m2 or 4.8 hectares)

  WEIGHT: 2.7 tons (2,450 kg)

  PRICE: $15.18 for the first volume; prices rose over time

  The greatest of the union catalogs, though, is a twentieth-century American production—a work so immense that it was recognized as a national strategic asset during the Second World War and involved an airlift operation whose logistics had some of the complexity of the war itself.

  The first inklings of an American union catalog came from Charles Coffin Jewett, the librarian of the Smithsonian, who in 1850 proposed the distribution of stereotype plates of printed library catalogs. Nothing came of such a complex plan, but soon a practical development in the way local catalogs were maintained eased some of that complexity. Libraries have to deal with growing collections: new books are constantly coming in, and they need to find space both on the shelf and in the catalog. Librarians would routinely leave blanks between the entries in their handwritten catalogs, allowing for new entries. But maintaining alphabetical order in a bound manuscript is a losing battle, because it is never possible to know where the additions will be. The solution to the growing collection was surprisingly elegant: catalogs were prepared not in bound volumes but on cards, which could be arranged in purpose-built drawers. Harvard was using 2″ × 5″ cards in the 1860s, though eventually 3″ × 5″ became standard in the United States and the United Kingdom.21

  Once catalog entries were on cards that could be removed from their drawers, the American Library Association proposed finding means to share the cards. In June 1898, the Library of Congress offered copies of their own cards for newly cataloged books, available by subscription. This made life infinitely easier for small public libraries, which could now rely on the experts in D.C. to catalog their new acquisitions. But this one-way traffic, with the Library of Congress providing cards for other libraries, did not do anything to report on other libraries’ holdings.

  The Library of Congress therefore proposed a scheme in 1901 to share cards from the major American research libraries, including the New York and Boston Public Libraries, the Harvard University Libraries, and others. The first step would be combining cards into one alphabetical sequence, an effort begun in 1909. They expected to collect about six hundred thousand cards. Two things became clear as soon as they started comparing collections systematically: how many books existed and how few any one library had. By 1926, they had assembled 1.96 million cards, and their work was barely a quarter of the way to completion. Even the biggest libraries had just a tiny fraction of the books that were in circulation. Spot-checking revealed that the Library of Congress—by far the largest library in America—owned just 7 percent of the titles in the new combined list. Of the others, only another 7 percent were owned by more than one library. The nation’s collections were both vast and vastly different. This discovery served only to make the need for a central catalog clearer.

  In 1926, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave a gift of $250,000 over five years—enough to employ thirty-one staffers to work on what was nicknamed Project B. The team identified 8.3 million copies of a total of 6.8 million works to add to the catalog. In the 1930s, as Rockefeller’s grant ran out, the Works Progress Administration stepped in, producing regional union catalogs that would feed into the central project. Evidence continued to mount as to how many books in these regional libraries were not in the master list.

  Although it was very much a work in progress, by the late 1930s the union catalog was being recognized as a genuinely useful resource—and it got a new use as the United States entered the Second World War. Knowledge was power, especially in the development of weapons, and the government began making requests to the Library of Congress, asking especially for books on scientific and technical subjects. Once again people were surprised by just how incomplete even the most comprehensive list of books in the country was: about a third of the books the government requested could not be located even on the library’s master list.

  By the early 1940s, this master catalog had become so cyclopean, and so valuable, that it was moved out of Washington to protect it during wartime. The catalog had become a strategic military asset, and government action had to be taken to guard it from enemy action. The Library of Congress decided to issue a printed version, even though the work was far from complete, in order to make their labors available to the rest of the country. About 1.9 million cards were reproduced in A Catalog of Books Represented by Library of Congress Printed Cards Issued to July 21, 1942, an interim publication of a mere 167 volumes, followed by a 42-volume supplement. Dozens of libraries subscribed to the printed set, checking their own holdings against the master list and making a note whenever their holdings included something not in the central catalog. Within a year, an
other eighty thousand books were added to the master list.

  The war ended; the work continued. Halsey William Wilson published A Proposed Plan for Printing Library of Congress Cards in Cumulative Book Form in 1946, and in 1948 the effort received the official name of National Union Catalog. A formal proposal for printing a carefully collated set came in 1953, and the agreement was reached in June 1964. The National Union Catalog Publication Project (NUCPP) was officially established in February 1967. The first decision was to draw a line: only books from before 1956 would be included. This would ensure that all the volumes would have the same coverage. The printed catalog would contain every card in the Library of Congress catalog, and the cards would be annotated with all the locations where a book might be found. If a major American library owned a book that was not in the Library of Congress, that library’s card would appear in the book, again with location information. The plan called for sixty printed volumes a year over the course of ten years, for a total of 610 volumes, each of around 700 pages. Photographic reproduction would capture a few dozen index cards on each page.

  The challenges were nearly overwhelming. The Library of Congress, having canvassed the country’s other major research libraries, was sitting on more than 20 million cards, with no standardization of size, format, or the kinds of information they contained. Some were detailed records with precise transcriptions of the title pages, publication information, and even bibliographic collation formulas; others were single-line records that merely acknowledged the existence of a title. Some slips had to be cut to fit in the drawers built for them; others were too small and had to be mounted on cards. Duplicates had to be weeded out. When a book existed in the records of more than one library, they had to select the most reliable record. But it was not always clear when there were duplicates. Did two similar, but not perfectly identical, records point to the existence of two editions?—or was one merely a “ghost,” the result of sloppy cataloging in the first place?

  Between twenty-five and thirty project editors each worked through fourteen hundred cards a week. When they had done the necessary sorting, the cards were hastily microfilmed to provide a backup in case a shipment was lost, and then they were flown in batches, with almost military efficiency, to a London publisher, Mansell, for printing. Mansell won the contract because they had developed a technique by which blank space was removed from photographed copies, thereby avoiding wasted space. Even with the compactness offered by Mansell, the catalog is still huge. Volume 445, for instance, takes five hundred pages to get from Patronato Central to Pavlovskii Leibgvard II; the Smiths start in volume 550 and end in volume 552. But the team continued the five-volumes-a-month pace without missing a deadline until the project was completed, with volume 685 in June 1979.

  The National Union Catalog has been called “the bibliographical wonder of the world.” From conception to completion, it took eighty years and $34 million. One reviewer, holding the first volume, could offer little more than stunned silence: “A reviewer is normally expected to say something about the value of the title being reviewed… . This catalog is so tremendous, with such a great potential, and appears to be so well done so far that it is felt better to delay such a review for maybe ten years or so. Maybe then one can do justice to it.”22 But when the reviewers could find words, they were glowing. One review of the first five volumes opened with “Has ever a bibliographical enterprise been so eagerly awaited, by so many, for so long?” The same reviewer called it “by far the largest constellation in the Gutenberg galaxy.”23

  These days the cataloging action is online. Even before the printed set of the National Union Catalog was finished, computers were appearing, with the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) introducing the first electronic library catalog in August 1971. The Library of Congress considered getting into the computer catalog business itself but decided to support OCLC instead; its mission expanded from Ohio to the United States, and then to the whole world, and in the process the initials were repurposed as the Online Computer Library Center. Today their catalog, WorldCat, contains records from 72,000 libraries in 113 countries, with 2,223,658,162 items in the catalog, including books, archives, magazines, maps, CDs, DVDs, and databases.24 And yet the cataloging project is far from complete. Many libraries are even now only partially cataloged, and of those that have been cataloged, not all their holdings have made it into the electronic catalogs—about a quarter of the books in the National Union Catalog are not (yet) in WorldCat.25 Old books regularly turn up whose existence no one was aware of. As one of Harvard’s librarians put it as long ago as 1869, “The cataloguer should not expect to be satisfied with his work.”26

  “Good cataloging,” writes John Overholt, the curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection at Harvard, “is the foundation stone of librarianship. If you have an item and can’t find it, you don’t really have it.” When administrators propose cutting cataloging staff, Overholt cautions, “Saving money on cataloging only externalizes the costs in public services staff labor, duplicate purchases, and patron frustration.”27 The same sentiment was put more poetically a century and a half earlier: “A library is not worth anything without a catalogue,” said Thomas Carlyle; “it is a Polyphemus without any eye in his head.”28

  CHAPTER 21 ½

  INDEX LEARNING

  Is Google making us stupid?

  That was Nicholas Carr’s question in 2008. “Over the past few years,” he worried, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” In the Google age, the danger is that “we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”1 The logic is that ease of access is incompatible with profound contemplation—as information access gets easier, we’ll take it increasingly for granted, and then knowledge itself will become superficial. Because I can know any fact I want to know in seconds without even getting off the sofa—Mount Kilimanjaro is 19,341 feet (5,895 m) high; the B side of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” was “I Was the One”; cricket was first played in India in 1721—I need not take the time to stock my brain with knowledge, and without deep knowledge, I can never aspire to wisdom.

  This anxiety about ready access to information has a long history. Centuries before people worried about Google and Wikipedia, they worried about reference books and other scholarly apparatus. The first alphabetical indexes date to the fourteenth century,2 and the paraphernalia of learning, which had long been the preserve of classical scholars, began showing up in the modern languages in the seventeenth century. In eighteenth-century Britain, some readers felt particularly threatened by the rise of indexes, glossaries, and concordances, all of which let the merest impostor appear as learned as the greatest sage. Alexander Pope dismissed this kind of knowledge as mere “Index-learning”:

  How Prologues into Prefaces decay,

  And these to Notes are fritter’d quite away:

  How Index-learning turns no student pale,

  Yet holds the eel of science by the tail.3

  Someone who depends on indexes is getting erudition on the cheap. In his bizarre satire on “modern” learning, A Tale of a Tub, Pope’s friend Jonathan Swift took aim at all literary aids to comprehension, including marginalia, footnotes, dictionaries, and indexes—especially indexes. He blames those superficial scholars who hope “to get a thorough Insight into the Index, by which the whole Book is governed and turned, like Fishes by the Tail.” The satirical Grub Street Journal complained in 1735 that “One of the principal causes of the decay of Learning is … the over great care that has been taken to preserve it… . The multitude of Abridgements, of New Methods, of Indexes, of Dictionaries, have damped that lively ardour which made scholars; and they have thought to know, that without any study, which they were assured might be learned with but moderate pains.”4 And the novelist Samuel Richardson wrote to a friend in 1750 complaining about “this age of dictionary and index learning,
in which our study is to get knowledge without study.”5 The index, that is to say, amounts to cheating. “An index,” literary historian Paul Tankard writes, “as an (albeit institutionalized) short cut, is always subversive; it suggests the possibility of avoiding the author’s prose, of undermining the linearity of the text, of re-writing it. An index treats all prose as (mere) rhetoric.”6

  Actually, the fear is even older than the index—it is as old as writing itself. We see exactly the same anxiety in one of Plato’s dialogues composed around 370 B.C.E. Socrates lectures Phaedrus about “a famous old god, whose name was Theuth,” an inventor, whose greatest creation was writing. Theuth offered to share the gift of letters with the Egyptian people: “This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.” The Egyptian king, though, is unconvinced. Writing sounds like a gift, he says, but it will simply “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” The result will be a race of dilettantes: “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”7 Two and a half millennia later, and we continue to fret about the inevitable decline.