Part 2 — PREFATORY NOTE.

There are plenty of treatises on classification, of which accounts may be found in Edwards’s Memoirs of Libraries and Petzholdt’s Bibliotheca Bibliographica. The classification of the St. Louis Public School Library Catalogue is briefly defended by W. T. Harris in the preface (which is reprinted, with some additions, from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1870). Professor Abbot’s plan is explained in a pamphlet printed and in use at Harvard College Library, also in his “Statement respecting the New Catalogue” (part of the report of the examining committee of the library for 1863), and in the North American Review for January, 1869. The plan of Mr. Schwartz, librarian of the Apprentices’ Library, New York, is partially set forth in the preface to his catalogue; and a fuller explanation is preparing for publication. For an author-catalogue there are the famous 91 rules of the British Museum [1] (prefixed to the Catalogue of Printed Books, Vol. 1, 1841, or conveniently arranged in alphabetical order by Th. Nichols in his Handbook for Readers at the British Museum, 1866); Professor Jewett’s modification of them (Smithsonian Report on the Construction of Catalogues, 1852); Mr. F. B. Perkins’s further modification (in the American Publisher for 1869), and a chapter in the second volume of Edwards. [2] But for a dictionary-catalogue as a whole, and for most of its parts, there is no manual whatever. Nor have any of the above-mentioned works attempted to set forth the rules in a systematic way or to investigate what might be called the first principles of cataloguing. It is to be expected that a first attempt will be incomplete, and I shall be obliged to librarians for criticisms, objections, or new problems, with or without solutions. {4} With such assistance perhaps a second edition of these hints would deserve the title—Rules. [3]