Hidden Wisdom and
Unseen Treasure: Revisiting
Cataloging in
Medieval Libraries
Cataloging
in the medieval period was rudimentary at best, but serves as the foundation
for the system that we use today. The biggest problem medieval librarians dealt
with was lack of a standard when organizing their collections and every library
had a different way of cataloging their collections. There was no mass printing and books were not as common or widely
available as they are today so libraries in the medieval times did not have
huge collections or a need to constantly keep up with a quickly growing
collection. A lot of the libraries
were part of churches and monasteries, used to hold religious texts intended
for monks and other individuals involved in the church. Once larger libraries
were built to include secular as well as religious works, librarians realized
that they needed a better system of organizing, finding, and retrieving items
from their collections. This is when cataloging became more involved with the
content of books rather than just the title and author.
They also needed to note the location of the items in these larger building and
began labeling shelves and including the shelf name in their catalogs. Medieval catalogers used a variety of techniques to record
the books in their collections, including details such as physical
descriptions, condition of the item, opening lines, and many more. Books in
medieval catalogs were also divided by function. School books were kept
together, while religious books had their own place. In the Durham Cathedral,
books that were restricted to who could use them were kept locked away behind
iron gates. Interestingly enough, union catalogs, which are a collaborative
list of all of the items within a group of libraries, did exist in this time
period and were intended to be used by travelers looking for a specific item so
that they wouldn’t waste their time going to so many different libraries. This
meant they could go to a nearby library and be able to see if other libraries
in the area had it, very similar to today’s library systems. The Registrum Librorum Angliae from 1296 was one of these union lists and contained the
holdings of one hundred and eighty-three libraries in England. It is
interesting to see how similar yet very different medieval cataloging is from
modern cataloging. Medieval librarians changed how they sorted and cataloged their
libraries based on what their individual library needed at the time. It seems
that a lot of the same ideas and reasoning are still in use, we have just adapted
to technology available to us today.
Reference
Russell, B. M. (1998).
Hidden Wisdom and Unseen Treasure: Revisiting Cataloging in Medieval
Libraries. Cataloging & Classification
Quarterly, 26(3), 21-30.
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