Cataloguing Research in India

Research in cataloguing may be said to have begun in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Prior to 1928, the chief contributors were Baber, Panizzi, Jewett, Crestadoro, Dziatzko, Cutter, Linderfelt, and Kaiser. Their work was largely empirical. Research in cataloguing took a new turn in 1928 with the formulation of the Five Laws of Library Science by S R Ranganathan, and a still more positive turn in 1938, with his formulation of Normative Principles special to cataloguing. Work up to 1950 was done by him single-handed. From 1951, active developmental research was made possible by the formation of the Library Research Circle in Delhi. As Chairman of the Documentation Sectional Committee of the Indian Standards Institution Ranganathan promoted standards for Alphabetisation, Cataloguing Terminology, Lay-out of Catalogue Code, and Supplement to Author Statement to be printed on the back of the title-page of a book. Since 1953, at the international level he has been suggesting the formulation of simplified cataloguing rules for the books of the future, based on the standard for the Supplement to Author Statement. In his own catalogue code he provided rigorous rules for Classified Catalogue, Dictionary Catalogue, and rules for National Bibliography, Indexing and Abstracting Periodical, Union Catalogue and for cataloguing of Periodical Publications. Cataloguing research in India has been brought to the level of a priori research and thus Cataloguing has now become a science based art.