SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CATALOGUING IN THE U.S.A.

THE last ten years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in cataloguing in the United States. As late as 1935 the veteran cataloguer, J. C. M. Hanson, was complaining that cataloguing no longer attracted the same attention as the financial, sociological, or even mechanical aspects of librarianship. A few years later the situation had completely changed, and since 1940 the problem of cataloguing has become one of the chief subjects for discussion amongst American librarians. The immediate occasion for this revival of interest was the publication of the preliminary edition of the American revision of the Anglo‐American code. Work on this had begun in 1930, but for the first few years the work of revision was left entirely to cataloguers and treated as a matter exclusively of technical and specialist interest. Then, just before publication of the preliminary edition, as an American cataloguer ruefully remarks, it occurred to some administrators and a few cataloguers that the time was ripe for a review of the whole of current cataloguing theory and practice.