In honor of the Catalog

The Library Catalog: that labyrinth of titles, authors, subjects, keywords, publication information, series titles and perhaps even major characters that is the map to infinite intellectual treasures. Well, it is now. When I was younger it was a torment invented by cranky old men and women who wanted nothing more than an empty room and silent students giving correct answers. Ah, the gentle nature of youth!

I am still working through Matthew Battles’s book Library: An Unquiet History, and thoroughly enjoying myself. Today, I read about Antonio Panizzi, the man who redesigned the library catalog of the British Museum and in so doing, changed the way patrons and librarians interacted with that catalog permanently. He was a young attorney who found himself in exile from his home state of Modena in Italy in 1823 after publishing an account of the trials of revolutionaries with whom he’d associated. He escaped over the Alps, was sentenced to death in absentia and eventually found himself in England where he tutored in Italian, learned English and eventually got himself appointed assistant librarian at the British Museum in 1831 (128-9).

His work “cataloging a collection of impossible complicated tracts from the English Civil War (129)” marked him as the best person to take on recreating the catalog from 1810, which in seven volumes with pages and pages of notes and addenda was becoming unusable. That catalog had been written as an inventory, in alphabetical order by book title, and Panizzi found that in many cases information was incomplete and there was no connection drawn between any of the works.

“Such crucial information as the author’s name, the publisher, and the date and place of publication might be incomplete, erroneous, or missing altogether. Panizzi developed a series of rules that reproduced these relations in the catalog, so that librarians – and crucially, readers – could trace and follow them. Unwittingly at first, he was helping to transform the library catalog from an inventory into an instrument of discovery. (130)” (emphasis mine)

In 1837 he was appointed Keeper of the Books and in seven years published one volume: A. The amount of time that it took Panizzi to create the catalog inspired a certain amount of grumbling on the part of some people, namely one Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas. Battles explains that part of his invective was to do with jealousy that Panizzi had so much influence in the library, partly there is a concern: “he is afraid that it (the complexity of the catalog) will make the reader do more work. (131)” While that reads alright, as Battles goes on, we begin to see there is something far more familiar than empathy at work.

“Early in the project, Panizzi had chosen to add the ‘pressmark’ of each book to its entry in the catalog. Like a call number on a modern library book, the gnomic pressmark indicated precisely the place where the book was to be found among the shelves of the library stacks (or ‘presses,’ as bookshelves were commonly called). (132)” The idea is that the pressmark indicates a geographic location; it does not refer to a subject or topic as Dewey call numbers do. If Dewey number 720.977 will find you in front of a book on Architecture in St. Louis, the number 230 c 9 in Panizzi’s catalog will find you looking at a book in the press (shelves) numbered 230, shelf c, position 6 (I’m thinking from the left, but that is a culturally grounded assumption).

Nicolas took offense at the amount of work a reader had to do to learn and understand all 91 rules Panizzi developed for his catalog. However, “Nicolas sensed that Panizzi was trying to produce not only a new kind of catalog but a new kind of reader as well – one more independent, more knowledgeable of library systems – and he wished to play no part in the revolution. (132-3)”

In Panizzi’s view of his catalog it was something that ‘”the public have the right to expect in such an institution”…”I want the poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,”…”of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom.”(130-1)’ His work was not intended to play the part of something like a shopping list, it was meant to draw readers into the world of discovery, and to provide equal opportunity for every reader to be drawn in, not only the rich and not only the poor. His rules built bridges of connection.

I’ve never seen this catalog. I would love to. I expect that it would look fairly incomprehensible at first. Then again, I felt that way about Dewey and also about Reader’s Guides and most bibliographies.

Libraries now seem to be catering to the reader like Nicolas, who does not want to think too much about deeper questions than “is this title available and for how long can I have it?” I begin now to see catalogs grounded in the philosophy that it is not necessary for readers or librarians to draw from a diversified and intellectually stimulating range of texts and materials, rather that staying with the range of a single title will do just fine.

It is a revolutionary idea anymore that challenged and challenging inquiry is the mark of a well-grounded and developed adult. There is subversion in seeking out more than one answer to the same question. There is even more subversion in finding more than one question to go with each answer. Libraries do not have to be veiled hiding places of incomprehensible babble. They can be transparent organisms well-traveled and identified. Catalogs, well designed and maintained (not easy work, either of those), can begin to provide libraries with transparency, but they do need to be learned and translated, and that is not comfortable.

Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. 214 pages +notes & index.