College and Research Libraries By DOROTHY F. LIVINGSTON Controlled Cataloging: ·An Experiment at Yale H ow MUCH of a cataloger's time is spent surveying and sorting the material that comes to his desk? If he has to handle his own arrears, how much more time must he spend arranging them so that specific items may be found if called for? Suppose he might spend all of this time on actual cataloging, would not his production of · finished work be materially increased? Could the deferred work of the entire de- partment be organized in such a way that specific items might be found if called for and yet not be the responsibility of the indi- vidual catalogers themselves? What would be the psychological effect on catalogers if they were not surrounded by masses of un- digested arrears? Questions such as these have been dis- turbing us at Yale for some time and this year we decided to try an experiment of controlling the flow of material to the cata- logers so that they need spend no time de- ciding what could be deferred; everything that came to their desks was to be cataloged promptly, and presumably there would be time left over to dig into previously de- ferred material. In fact, one of the incen- tives for the inauguration of this program was the hope of clearing up much of the old arrears that had long been accumulating around our desks and in the portion of stacks used for storage. · Much of this ma- terial had been dug up fr.om obscure re- cesses in the old library when we moved in I 930; much was work begun· and left un- finished by resigning catalogers, and in- JANUARY~ 1947 herited by the present staff; a great deal of it was what we call snags, unimportant in themselves but requiring patienf study and hours ot time for apparently small ends. All catalog departments of large libraries doubtless accumulate such problems; the pressure of incoming material forces atten- tion on that which can be moved easily and quickly; special collections arrive unher- alded and must be dealt with promptly; problems are put aside to be taken up when one has more time-and one never has. Eventually the department becomes choked with masses of - material; more and more time is spent hunting through it for wanted items, less and less in cataloging; the mor- ale of the staff suffers, and it is up to the administrator to do something about it. Another incentive for this experiment w'as the possibility it offered of organizing, according to subject matter, the cataloging of non-rush material in larger lots than would be possible if it were handled volume by volume as acquired. Haskins' recent article1 stressed this point in Harvard's plan for handling old gift material and gave impe~us to our own vague ideas on the same subject. Factors Affecting Plan Before describing the plan inaugurated this past year as an experiment ' in the han- dling of deferred material, it will be neces- sary to explain a few points concerning the 1 Haskins, Susan M. "Something New in Cataloging. " College and Research Libraries 6:291, September 1945. 11 ' organization of our library, since any such plan must fit into the general scheme df work and must make use of existing rou- tines. The primary feature of the catalog department is its organization on· subject lines, so that a single group of catalogers (number depending on size of class) is responsible .for classification, subject assign- ment, and descriptive cataloging of all books and pamphlets within its field. Serials, cata- loged in the serial department, are also sent to these sub'ject groups for classification arid subject assignment, as well as rare books and books in unusual foreign languages, which are cataloged by specially qualified assistants. Documents are not set up as a group apart from . the regular classes, but are treated as monographs, serials, or pam- phlets, and are integrated in our classifica- tion along with other material on the same topics. Another feature of our library organiza- tion closely affecting the work of the cata- log department is the method of accession- ing. Yale has no system of numbering and listing accessions in order of receipt. The accessions file is an alphabetical card file like the catalog, except that the information on the cards relates to source, cost, date of receipt, etc. All books received by purchase or exchange are accessioned but most gifts are not; hence, there is no way of locating items in the library acquired by gift until they are cataloged. Books received as · gifts are searched in the catalog by the accessions department, duplicates being rejected and the rest forwarded to the catalog depart- ment. Several years ago an arrangement was. made between the two departments whereby the checking assistant of the ac- cessions department inserts a slip of paper in each book, giving the full author heading and noting the call number of any other edi- tion in the library. The supplying of this information saves the catalogers a great deal of time and is a vital factor in the operation of our program regarding deferred ma- terial. The sorting of books into classes for dis- tribution to the catalogers is done daily by the head cataloger in the accessions depart- ment before the books are plated and labeled with the class letters. Thereaft'er the books are shelved on a large truck, wheeled to the depository catalog, and checked for printed cards by junior catalogers before being dis- tributed to the class groups for cataloging. Any printed cards available are extracted from the depository and inserted in the books for the use of the catalogers. Another factor affecting our plan was the existence of collections of uncataloged re- serves in various parts of the library stacks, their nature and whereabouts known to few of the present staff. They stem from our early days when it was the policy to shelve material as it was received in the stacks in its proper subject place to await cataloging. Space in the catalog department in the old library was so limited that it was customary, when handling large groups of material, to send the catalogers into the stacks to do their work, to be followed by the labelers and markers, leaving the collection all properly cataloged, labeled, marked, and shelved in its correct place. Over the years we have cleared up the bulk of such uncata- loged deposits, but by no means all of them. Outline of Plan The first decision governing our treat- ment of "defers" was to set them up in the large classes in which they would even- tually be classified so that they might be easily accessible any time that the specific group was ready to catalog them, without the necessity of selection from a compre- hensive alphabetical file of all classes. The second decision was to arrange the books numerically under each class rather 12 COLLEGE. AND RESEARCI-I LIBRARIES than alphabetically, numbering them con- secutively as they were added to the file. Besides the obvious advantages of saving both the time of alphabeting each con- signment and the space for an unknown number of volumes, this method had the . added superiority of enabling us at any time to tell how many deferred books there were in any . given class just by looking at the last number assigned and to redeploy the cataloging assistance accordingly when we were ready to undert'.ike the cataloging of any specific class. The third decision was to list the books by author in both public and official cata- logs-in the public catalog so that specific titles could be located by readers; in the official · catalog so that duplicates could be discovered by the accessions department in . the checking of gifts. We also decide~ to bring down from the stacks the remaining uncataloged groups mentioned above, 'as we found time, to set them up in our single file· of arrears, and to list them, too, in the cata- log. This decision nullified the use of the statistics of this year's defers as synonymous with this year's accessions. However, once having achieved our objective of an author · card in the catalog for every book not in present proces~ of being· cataloged ot 're- vised, we can begin to count defers as cur- · rent accessions and obtain some better idea · of how much material is · acquired annually in each class-knowledge which will be useful in the general allocation of number of catalogers to various · subject groups. Inception of P_lan The "defer" plan was conceived two years ago and its general policies approved by the administration and department heads. This is not to say that this approval was easily won. Although all were aware that there were hundreds of uncataloged books in the library, s0mehow it was felt that this JANUARY~ 1947 sh~uld not be publicly acknowledged; like a .skeleton in the closet, it was better kept out of sight. It was difficult to convince other department heads that the reader would be better served by this listing; that the reference assistants would be spared guessing which class might conceivably be hiding some wanted item, consulting with the cataloger, hunting through uncataloged arrears. It was difficult to convince them of the temporary nature of this listing; it seemed to them that the catalog department was proposing this as a substitute for cata- loging rather than as an intermediate step between acquisition and cataloging and that once the books were sent to the defer file they would be abandoned and forgotten. We recognized this as a real danger .in the program, and took steps which are ex- plained later, to meet it. Having won consent to the program, we were unable to implement it at that time (February 1944) because we · were still suffering wartime shortages of staff and. had not the necessary ~ssistance, although we did make a beginning by sending some old gift material, wit~out listing it in the cata- log, to the storage . room in the basement which . now houses the entire file. When the war ended we knew it would not be long before the opening of the European book markets would flood us with books held by our dealers for the past six years. It was, therefore, imperative to start the program of deferments without further delay; to allocate everything "except new imprints and books especially requested to this file, whether acquired by gift, purchase, or exchange, so that the catalogers would . have as much time ,as possible to clear the department of old arrears before we should be swamped with more important material. We began the actual listing last Sep- tember ( 1945) and, besides taking ~are of current defers, spent the first three months 13 catching up with the previously deferred books and also taking over some of the books in the catalogers' old files of arrears, so that they might spend their time on more important items and titles too difficult to be listed by the comparatively inexperienced listing staff. Selection of Defers The : selection of titles to be currently de- ferred is made by the head cataloger during her daily assignment of class letters to in- coming material, often with the advice of the head of the accessions department. The criterion for selection this year was simply to defer everything that could possibly be deft=:rred, but often the decision had to be made on grounds that had nothing to do with the relative unimportance of the book. The listing staff consisted of one experi- e.nced and unusually responsible clerical worker with some foreign language back- ground, who was in charge of the program, and part-time help from two other clerical workers, one with and one without training in foreign languages. Occasionally for large groups of foreign books we utilized specially qualified student assistants. None of the listers was experienced in cataloging, a.nd it was therefore necessary to reject from the deferred file material that presented unusual difficulties of entry or title tran- scription, as well as books in Latin, Greek, Russian, and Hebrew, and books requiring more than one entry, since we did not pro- pose to complicate the listing by making references from pseudonyms or title cards for anonyms. It was also necessary to pay some attention to the donor's name to be sure ·he would not be offended if his gift did not receive prompt and complete cata- loging and classification. Because these various ·elements conditioned the selection, it was made clear to the catalogers that, no matter what the relative importance of the books seemed to be, all sent to them were to be cataloged promptly. Pamphlets were omitted from the pro- · gram, alth