College and Research Libraries


By V I V I A N A. PETERSON and O. M. H O V D E 

Revitalizing the Card Catalog 

CARD CATALOGS are growing in size and complexity at such an alarming rate 
that programs of catalog maintenance 
are becoming increasingly important to 
librarians. If the number of published 
papers on the subject is indicative of the 
extent of such projects, it appears that 
libraries are building catalogs but not 
repairing or reconditioning them. In 
1953 Osborn and Haskins stressed the 
need of catalog maintenance.1 T h e Li-
brary of Congress has a plan of editing 
and refiling its catalog which is expected 
to take over eleven years and cost about 
$750,000.2 For reasons of efficiency and 
economy, staffs of large and small librar-
ies need to begin to plan now for re-
vitalizing their card catalogs. 

Such a project of card catalog revision 
was begun at Luther College Library, 
Decorah, Iowa, in the fall of 1953, be-
cause there was a feeling that the catalog 
was not serving as well as it could and 
should in aiding the college students, li-
brarians, and other faculty members in 
locating library materials. T h e plan was 
initiated after discussion among all pro-
fessional library staff members of the 
necessity for refiling the catalog because 
of inconsistencies in filing arrangements 
in various parts of the catalog, filing 
rules which seemed too complex for un-
dergraduate students, and miscellaneous 
inadequacies. 

1 A n d r e w D . Osborn and S u s a n M . H a s k i n s , "Cata-
log M a i n t e n a n c e , Library Trends, I I ( 1 9 5 3 ) , 279-89. 

2 " R e v i s e d P r o p o s a l f o r E d i t i n g the M a i n and Offi-
cial C a t a l o g s . " M e m o r a n d u m , D e c . 29, 1952, f r o m 
C. S u m n e r S p a l d i n g , Chief of the Catalog M a i n t e n a n c e 
D i v i s i o n of the Library of C o n g r e s s , to the Director 
of the P r o c e s s i n g D e p a r t m e n t . 

Miss Peterson is head of the catalog 
department, and Mr. Hovde is librarian, 
Luther College. 

Concrete planning began with a series 
of staff discussions of the A.L.A. Rules 
for Filing Catalog Cards and a notation 
of which rules were to be followed. T h e 
original plan was simply to revise the 
filing, but it soon became apparent to 
the staff that it would be desirable and, 
on the whole, more economical to do as 
complete a revision as was possible in 
the process of checking through the cata-
log card by card. T h e entire plan was 
not completely formulated before the 
project began because some of the needs 
were not apparent until one of the li-
brarians reached a section of the catalog 
in which the problem existed. Frequent 
short conferences were held during the 
process of refiling the first few trays to 
decide the ways in which those specific 
problems should be handled. 

T h e revision project was carried out 
by the professional library staff, consist-
ing of the head librarian, reference li-
brarian, and catalog librarian, over a 
period of about one and one-half years. 
Each librarian tried to spend an hour 
each week-day morning on the project, 
but during especially busy times of the 
school year it was not possible to work 
regularly. T h e 271 catalog trays contain-
ing about 270,000 cards were divided 
numerically into sections and each li-
brarian was given a specific area in 
which to work. 

T h e following were the details of the 
revision project: 

1. Cards were arranged in a word-for-
word alphabetical order wherever pos-
sible. Whenever the bulk of cards in a 
section, such as Bible, Luther, Shake-
speare, warranted some other arrange-
ment, cards explaining the filing order 

4 2 0 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



were placed at the beginning of the sec-
tion and guide cards inserted to help 
clarify the deviation. Words with variant 
spellings were interfiled and cross refer-
ences made from the form not used 
whenever that had not already been 
done. 

2. Main entries for various editions 
were refiled in inverse chronological 
order. 

3. Temporary cards which had been 
in the catalog for many years were 
pulled. T h e reviser then checked to see 
if permanent cards had been filed with-
out removing the temporary ones. Later 
an evaluation of the remaining materials 
cataloged temporarily was made and 
withdrawal or permanent cataloging was 
carried out. 

4. Cards which were worn out, dirty, 
illegible or handwritten were pulled. 
These cards, or sets of cards, were edited 
by the cataloger and retyped by the 
typist. Cards with typographical errors 
were pulled and given to the typist for 
correction. Old cards with Dewey Deci-
mal Classification numbers which had 
not been removed when the collection 
was reclassified according to the Library 
of Congress system were withdrawn. Se-
ries cards for some insignificant series 
whose importance could not be fully ap-
praised when first used and see also ref-
erences which had been made for sub-
jects not used in the catalog were also 
withdrawn. 

5. Inconsistencies in forms of entry 
for the same person or body and in 
forms of subject headings were noted 
and corrected when they were so filed as 
to be obvious to the reviser. Obsolete 
subject headings were removed and re-
ferred to the cataloger who made the 
necessary changes to up-to-date termi-
nology as given in the Library of Con-
gress subject heading list. 

6. Subject headings and references 
used in the card catalog (except form 
divisions or subdivisions that may be 

used with different classes of subject 
headings) were listed on sheets of paper. 
These lists were to serve as the basis for 
an accurate and more complete subject 
authority record. Because all the librar-
ians worked during the early morning 
hours when the catalog area was not 
crowded and when they could readily 
confer on problems, it was not practical 
to check the subject authority book dur-
ing the revision process. Perhaps it 
might have been preferable to purchase 
added copies of the subject heading book 
for checking along with the revision. 

7. Inverted title cards were withdrawn. 
T h e cataloger later reviewed them, can-
celling some, changing some to partial 
non-inverted titles, and assigning to 
others subject headings which had not 
been in use when the book was original-
ly cataloged. A few were returned to the 
catalog as inverted titles. Since the cata-
log is in a dictionary arrangement, title 
cards were removed for books with iden-
tical, or almost identical, spellings of 
subject headings and titles. 

8. Any other catalog cards which 
seemed to have inconsistencies, errors, 
or questions were pulled and referred to 
the catalog librarian for study. 

9. Corrections and additions needed in 
guide cards were noted and new angle 
guide cards with printed headings were 
inserted. 

10. Lastly, the cataloger shifted the 
catalog cards to eliminate uneven dis-
tribution in the trays and had new labels 
made for them. 

T h e difficulties of the catalog revision 
resulted chiefly from the mildly chaotic 
state of the catalog during the year and 
a half that the project was being done. 
However, it was found that few students 
commented or complained about the 
existing inconsistencies. Perhaps the 
chief difficulty was in filing and revising 
the filing of new cards. T h e attempt 
was made to file new cards by the new 
method whenever that could be done 

SEPTEMBER, 1956 421 



without isolating them f r o m those f o r 
related materials already in the catalog. 

In the o p i n i o n of the library staff, the 
benefits of the project far outweigh the 
difficulties involved and the time and 
effort spent. T h e catalog is n o w more 
accurate and complete because some er-
rors in cataloging, typing, and filing 
have been eliminated. Statistics of the 
number of cards withdrawn f r o m the 
catalog were not kept, but the removal 
of cards for see also references, inverted 

titles, and unnecessary series d i d result 
in a slight reduction of the size of the 
catalog. T h e librarians believe that they 
learned much about the b o o k collection 
represented by the cards in their particu-
lar section of the catalog. T h e reference 
librarian also says that she learned a 
great deal about cataloging and can bet-
ter interpret the b o o k collection f r o m 
the catalog. She reports that she actually 
misses her daily stint of card catalog re-
vision! 

Southern University Libraries in the Twentieth Century 
(Continued from page 389) 

indispensable part of any program of 
interlibrary cooperation. 

Finally, the university libraries of the 
South have felt the need for some broad-
ly based organization in the region to 
serve (1) as a clearing house and dis-
cussion g r o u n d f o r cooperative projects 
and (2) to give direction, guidance, and 
support to those that are deemed suffi-
ciently important. T h e genesis and spirit 
of this idea is to be f o u n d in SIRF, the 
Southeastern Interlibrary Research Fa-
cility. S I R F as n o w defined, however, is 
limited to library cooperation between 
university libraries in Georgia and Flori-
da; if the regional aims of the Southern 
Regional Education Board are to be car-
ried out, S I R F should become a genu-
inely regional library cooperative organ-
ization. T h i s will come about, it seems 
to me, inevitably, but the immediate 
r o a d b l o c k to expanding S I R F is the cost 
to the participating libraries of main-
taining a strong central organization to 
give thrust and m o m e n t u m to the ideas 
for cooperative action generated by the 
librarians of the region. If the Southern 
Regional Education Board c o u l d see its 
way clear to maintaining and financing 
a library department, particularly in the 
next few years when southern university 
libraries are straining every dollar to 

strengthen their collections and services, 
it w o u l d greatly speed u p the machinery 
of interlibrary cooperation and enable 
us to serve scholarship better in the 
Southeast. I am aware that the proposal 
for establishing a library department o f 
the Southern Regional Education Board 
is one which is asking the board to u n -
dertake an additional financial responsi-
bility of some magnitude. O n the other 
hand, each library will be contributing 
substantially f r o m its own funds and 
staff time in assisting the department t o 
carry out specific cooperative biblio-
graphic projects. T h e extension I sug-
gest w o u l d provide additional services 
beyond what could be provided by a li-
brary association staffed with purely vol-
untary assistance. It is the kind of ex-
tension which I feel sure the Southern 
Regional Education Board, of which our 
principal speaker is an important mem-
ber, w o u l d not refuse if it were satis-
fied that it was f o r the general welfare 
of education in the South; moreover, this 
w o u l d enable it to extend some por-
tion of the benefits of their p u b l i c funds 
to the great multitude of scholars in the 
South w h o d o not have the neighboring 
backstop of great repositories such as 
exist in the Harvard and Yale Univer-
sity libraries. 

422 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES