Band catalog
A volume catalog is a library catalog that consists of initially empty book volumes into which the media of a library are entered. Tape catalogs were the most common type of catalog until the end of the 19th century, when they were replaced by the emerging card catalog .
Volume catalogs consist of one or more volumes with initially blank pages. The librarians could enter the books available in the respective library on the blank pages until a complete list of the existing books was available. The entries were made by hand and in alphabetical order. A number of libraries kept several volume catalogs side by side, one of which was sorted by the name of the author and the other, for example, by the book title.
The major disadvantage of the volume catalog compared to other types of catalog is that each volume is filled once and then there is no more space for new entries. Although free spaces were left between the entries, at some point even these were filled with entries. In such cases one helped oneself with so-called switch sheets, which, however, could only be inserted to a limited extent and also interrupted the principle of order. However, this was necessarily larger anyway, since later entries could often no longer be made in exactly the correct alphabetical place - if, for example, a book was subsequently added whose author's name began with Sa, it might no longer be entered in front of a with Sc because there was none There was more space available, also for this reason band catalogs were sometimes copied several times and the entries were rearranged. Another disadvantage was that some of the handwritten entries were illegible . Erwin Ackerknecht did not introduce a uniform German library manuscript until the 20th century .
The volume catalog has been known since the Middle Ages and reached its peak in academic libraries in the 19th century . Hardly any volume catalogs have been kept since the advent of the card catalog. In libraries that have not yet recorded their old collections in newer catalog types, the tape catalog is still in use for these old collections. Around 1970 the band catalog experienced a temporary revival when catalogs produced with the help of computerized data were printed out and bound. Such printed volume catalogs are also known as book catalogs and were soon replaced by micro, CD-ROM and online catalogs.
literature
- Klaus Gantert, Rupert Hacker : Basic librarianship. 8th, completely revised and expanded edition. Saur, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-11771-8 , pp. 217-218.
- Dietmar Strauch , Margarete Rehm: Lexicon book, library, new media. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-11757-2 , p. 29.