No. 133, October 2003

Past and present of the Card Catalog in retrospect
Junko Yokoyama
Director, Domestic Materials Acquisition Division, Acquisitions Department

This is an abridged translation of the article of the same title in
the NDL Monthly Bulletin No. 509 (August 2003).

Contents

I. Changes the public catalog has gone through
II. Card catalogs maintained by the NDL
III. How do we write "Philippines"?
IV. Periodicals or book?
V. From card catalog to OPAC

I. Changes the public catalog has gone through

The public card catalog of Japanese books that had been used since the establishment of the National Diet Library (NDL) was removed from the catalog hall. Only the card catalogs of Chinese, Korean and Western books are left in the catalog hall because their retrospective conversion has not yet been finished.

Catalog Hall (before)

Catalog Hall (present)

Looking back chronologically at how we have managed ever-increasing card catalogs, we can see how card catalogs have gradually been overtaken by mechanical search.

1948	Dictionary catalog The public card catalog of the NDL started out in dictionary form, which was arranged just like dictionaries by authors, titles and subject entries
1961	Classified catalog (NDC and NDLC)  The NDL moved from the Akasaka detached palace (now used as the State Guest-house) to the new library building in Nagata-cho. On this occasion, the dictionary catalog was dismantled and an author/title catalog and a subject catalog were compiled. Subsequently, two types of classified catalogs, one based on the Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC) and the other on the National Diet Library Classification (NDLC), were added.
1977	Computer database The NDL started entering data into the Japanese books database - the first step to mechanical search.
1980	Card catalog printing/distributing system The NDL established a card catalog printing/distributing system, which made it possible to print the data in the Japanese books database on cards. * The card catalog printing/distributing service was a service that distributed catalog cards to libraries in Japan. It was abolished in March 1998.
1986	Rearrangement of card catalog; from alphabetical order to kana order The Asian Materials Division undertook the job of compiling the card catalog of Chinese and Korean books and placed them in the Asian Materials Room, instead of the main card catalog in the catalog hall. On this occasion, the card catalog was rearranged from alphabetical order into kana (Japanese syllabary) order, because Japanese books had mostly been traced by kana reading on the database. Subsequently, the card catalog was assigned kana headings, and was compiled by author and title in kana order. In the same year, the NDL stopped updating the card catalog of foreign books and changed over to mechanical search.
1988	Stopped updating card catalog of Japanese and Chinese materials
1991.4	Catalog in the form of CD-ROM installed in the catalog hall
1995.6	Classified catalog removed from the catalog hall
1996	Stopped updating author catalog and title catalog
1997.4	Introduced OPAC  Online public access catalog (OPAC) of Japanese books started working, and more computer terminals were installed in the catalog hall.

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II. Card catalogs maintained by the NDL Although the card catalog has been overtaken by mechanical search, the NDL still keeps the historic card catalog inherited from the Imperial Library.

One of the major sources of NDL materials is the holdings of the Imperial Library, and the NDL also inherited its catalogs. If you go to the catalog hall, you can see the card catalogs of the old Imperial Library. "Subject catalog of foreign books" and "author catalog of foreign books" are catalogs of materials acquired from 1875 to 1944. In those catalogs we can find cards in flowing handwriting(1), typewritten cards, and hurriedly made cards to which a piece of paper cut out from a book catalog was pasted(2). "Subject catalog of Japanese and Chinese materials" is a catalog of materials acquired from 1908 to 1940. This catalog consists of cards written in brushstrokes with Japanese ink(3), cards typed with a Japanese character typewriter and others printed by typography. The cards of the "Author catalog of Japanese and Chinese materials" accessioned from 1941 to 1949 include mimeographs.

(1). (2). (3).

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III. How do we write "Philippines"?

NDL card catalog headings of Japanese and Chinese materials were written in Kunrei Roman alphabet, and were placed in alphabetical order. In Japanese, a single kanji (Chinese character) often has various ways of reading, so we made instruction manuals for catalogers to standardize the reading and the spelling of the Roman alphabet assigned to each word.

We had to standardize transliteration, too. As the Kunrei Roman alphabet does not have "fi," "Philippines" is presented "hiripin." However, we made an exceptional rule for the names of foreign people and places (except for names of countries and geographical areas) in titles to present them in original spelling. (e.g. London, Moskva, Shakespeare, etc.) This rule was convenient in that the names with various transliterations were put in the same place, but people needed to know the original spelling to search the materials. Therefore, we put files at the catalog hall to look up the original spellings from kana readings.

After we started to compile the Japanese books database, we used printed cards produced from the data in the database as a public catalog. Since the system mechanically printed kana data on the cards, we had to manually correct the words supposed to be written in original spellings. Eventually, we started to think we could simply apply the mechanically assigned readings, and in 1986, as I mentioned above, the card catalog was rearranged to be placed in kana order.

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IV. Periodicals or books?

Although annual publications are classified as serials at present, they had been included in books until 1985. Official publications issued every year (e.g. annual statistics) deal with the same subject matters, just like periodicals.

For this kind of publication, we prepared catalog cards and check cards. Publication years and number of volumes of check cards were left blank at first, and every year we added the publication year to the check cards by hand to trace the acquisition without increasing the number of catalog cards. Although we had several kinds of catalogs - author catalog, title catalog, subject catalog and classified catalog - we added publication years only to author catalog or title catalog. Therefore, users had to find the card with added notes to get information of the library's holdings.

There was another problem. Titles of official publications go through minor changes year by year or when the name of the department has changed, even if the contents are the same. This causes a lot of trouble for those who maintain catalogs. For such publications, we decided to make new catalog cards every time the titles changed but to keep using the same check cards, considering that it was more convenient to shelve publications with the same contents in the same place. Such changes occurred very often, and it still is a problem in making a bibliography.

We also corrected, discarded or updated catalog cards when there were misprints in the title or changes in author headings, or when we bound materials for which we had once made a catalog for each issue but were too thin to be stored in the stacks separately. Now we can just rewrite bibliographic data every time we need a correction, but in the case of a card catalog, we had to replace the old card with a new one. The direction was written on the printed card, so it was easy to trace where we added new cards. However, old cards which were supposed to be replaced were occasionally left in the catalogs, and users happened to find them and request the materials. In most cases, it did not cause confusion as we could confirm the correct information added to the old cards in the stacks. However, if we failed to add it promptly, it looked as if the material had disappeared and it required investigation. From now on, we do not need to do any investigation because of forgetting to replace cards, but we may find other problems inherent in a mechanical search.

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V. From card catalog to OPAC

As I mentioned above, after we implemented mechanical search and adopted kana headings, we were freed from the tasks concerning original spellings in the titles. We still had problems caused by adopting the kana reading, but the problem of various readings assigned to a single word was solved because we could put several different readings into the OPAC.

A new problem that arose with the OPAC was where to leave spaces between words. Many Japanese words have several possible ways to be divided, and the search result may vary depending on which way you choose.

However, the NDL-OPAC we introduced for public use last year has many support functions for searching, and now we do not have to be troubled by different readings or where to divide words. Moreover, on the NDL-OPAC, we can search by kanji, which is much more convenient when searching more than a million data.

When you think of a card catalog, the pleasure in searching with card catalogs is that you may hit upon something interesting while you are turning over the cards. From now on, people may find another pleasure in browsing through the OPAC.