Catalogue
The term "Catalogue" was derived from the Greek phrase, Katalogos. Kata means "according to" and "logos" means "order" or reason.
The library catalogue is a list of books and other reading materials in the holdings of a library or a group of libraries. The list contains bibliographic details about the book and other reading material, which are useful for the users of catalogue. The details are author, title, the person or body assisting in bringing out the book, edition, place of publication, publisher, year of publication, information regarding physical detail like pages, size, illustrative materials, etc. Besides these information, the catalogue also bears a location mark, usually in numerical form, by which documents can be located on the shelves. According to J. H. Shera (1956), "the library catalogue does not or should not exist as an end in itself. It is one part of the total bibliographic system and must be responsive to changes that take place in other parts of the system".
Cataloguing denotes various processes adopted in preparing entries of the reading material in a catalogue and its maintenance. Library catalogues are different from the publishers' catalogues, booksellers' lists, bibliographies, etc. All of these reference tools are useful in building up the collections through library book selection.
According to C A. Cutter, a catalogue is "a list of books which is arranged on some definite plan. As distinguished from a bibliography, it is a list of books in some library or collections".
According to Margaret S. Taylor, "Bibliography is a list of books or manuscripts on a particular subject or subjects. A catalogue is also a list but its scope is limited to a particular collection".
According to Dr. S. R. Ranganathan, "A library catalogue is methodically arranged record of information about its bibliographical resources".
Therefore, a library catalogue:
i. is a list of books and other reading materials available in a particular library;
ii. contains entries prepared for all the documents according to rules prescribed in a catalogue code and organised in a systematic order;
iii. gives bibliographical information of the documents such as the author, title, edition, place of publication, publisher, date of publication in each entry in order to describe and identify the document; and
iv. gives location number of the document, such as call number of the document in order to locate the document on the shelves of the library.
