Truth be told, there are evenings in the library, when I misread or jumble the “Cutter Line” in the call number, the unique combination of letters and numbers that indicates the position of the book on the shelf, when I’m shelf reading in the collection – sometimes located on a way-too-narrow spine to suit my naturally aging hyperopic eyesight – I wonder if maybe it would have been a better thing if Charles Ammi Cutter had become the Unitarian minister he had planned on becoming when he entered Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1856. But that wasn’t meant to be apparently, as Cutter, who graduated from the school in 1859, was never ordained but instead carried on with the library work he had embarked on while on staff in the divinity school library as a student.
It was during the 1857-58 academic year at Harvard Divinity School that school year that Cutter started by rearranging the library collection on the shelves into broad subject categories. The following academic year, Cutter led a project to arrange the collection into a single listing alphabetically by author.
In 1860, Cutter joined the staff of Harvard College as assistant librarian and worked on the development of a new library catalog. Unlike most library catalogs of the time, Cutter’s catalog used index cards rather than being presented in the form of a published volume. The Cutter catalog consisted of an author file and an alphabetical classed catalog, which provided an early form of subject access. Cutter’s work with this type of catalog prepared him for his later work with a dictionary catalog.
Cutter’s legacy for librarians, as a result, has been what we refer to as the “Cutter Line” or “Cutter Numbers.” Cutter devised what is known as the “Two-Figure Author Table” as a method of arranging books by author within a given class. “His lifelong objective was the development of a classification system comprehensive of all human knowledge yet serviceable to the general user,” notes Noah Sheola in a June 2010 article for the Boston Athenæum, where Cutter served as librarian from 1868 until 1892. It was intended to be easy to use. How easy is still a matter of some debate. What is not debatable is the fact Cutter’s ideas, though he died in 1903 before completing the final schedules of his Cutter Expansive Classification, nevertheless formed the theoretical basis for the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system widely used by academic libraries in particular. The Library of Congress Classification system was first developed to organize and arrange the book collections of the United States federal government held by the Library of Congress, now the largest library in the world. Over the course of the 2oth century, the system was adopted for use by other libraries as well, especially large academic libraries in North America.
The Library of Congress was established by an Act of Congress in 1800 when President John Adams signed a bill providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. The legislation described a reference library for Congress only, containing “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress – and for putting up a suitable apartment for containing them therein…”
Established with $5,000 appropriated by the legislation, the original library was housed in the new Capitol in Washington until August 1814, when invading British troops set fire to the Capitol Building, burning and pillaging the contents of the small library.
“Within a month,” the Library of Congress notes on its website at https://www.loc.gov/about/history-of-the-library/,”retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating books, ‘putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science’; his library was considered to be one of the finest in the United States. In offering his collection to Congress, Jefferson anticipated controversy over the nature of his collection, which included books in foreign languages and volumes of philosophy, science, literature, and other topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library. He wrote, ‘I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.'”
In January 1815, Congress accepted Jefferson’s offer, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books. “The Jeffersonian concept of universality, the belief that all subjects are important to the library of the American legislature, is the philosophy and rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today’s Library of Congress.” Today a national institution, the Library of Congress is located in Washington in the Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First Street, SE; the James Madison Memorial Building at 101 Independence Avenue, SE; and the John Adams Building on Second Street SE, between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Streets.
The Library of Congress Classification system divides all knowledge into 21 basic classes, each identified by a single letter of the alphabet. Library of Congress Classification call numbers generally use a mixed notation of one, two, or three CAPITAL letters, integral or whole numbers from 1 to 9999 with possible decimal extensions, one or two cutter numbers, and, if appropriate, a year of publication. A single letter, always combined with numbers, represents a main class, corresponding roughly to a broad academic discipline, e.g. N33 equals general dictionaries of the visual arts.
Double or triple capital letters combined with numbers represent sub-classes of the main class, e.g. NB50 equals dictionaries and encyclopedias of sculpture, i.e., a sub-class of the broader visual arts.
Most of these alphabetical classes are further divided into more specific sub-classes, identified by two-letter, or occasionally three-letter, combinations. For example, class N, Art, has sub-classes NA, Architecture; NB, Sculpture, ND, Painting; as well as several other sub-classes.
Each sub-class includes a loosely hierarchical arrangement of the topics pertinent to the sub-class, going from the general to the more specific. Individual topics are often broken down by specific places, time periods, or bibliographic forms (such as periodicals, biographies, etc.). Each topic (often referred to as a caption) is assigned a single number or a span of numbers. Whole numbers used in Library of Congress Classification may range from one to four digits in length, and may be further extended by the use of decimal numbers. Some sub-topics appear in alphabetical – rather than hierarchical – lists and are represented by decimal numbers that combine a letter of the alphabet with a numeral , e.g. .B72 or .K535.
Relationships among topics in Library of Congress Classification are shown not by the numbers that are assigned to them, but by indenting sub-topics under the larger topics that they are a part of, much like an outline. In this respect, it is different from more strictly hierarchical classification systems, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, which is also used by the Library of Congress, as surprising as that may be to some given that the Library of Congress has its own classification system. But the Library of Congress “Dewey Section” uses the Dewey Decimal Classification system, to cite an example, when working in conjunction with the Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), a global library co-operative founded in 1967, as the Dewey Decimal Classification system is widely used by public libraries, as well as by elementary and high school libraries, along with many foreign libraries, with the DDC classifying hierarchical relationships among topics, shown by numbers that can be continuously subdivided.
In fact, the Library of Congress has a long tradition of providing Dewey numbers on its bibliographic records. In 1930 the Library of Congress began to print DDC numbers on nearly all of its cards, making the system immediately available to America’s libraries, the majority of which use the Dewey Decimal Classification system, developed in the 1870s by Melvil Dewey, and currently in its 23rd edition.
“The system organizes library materials by discipline into 10 main classes and its notation uses Arabic numbers, with three whole numbers making up the main classes and sub-classes and decimals creating further divisions,” noted Caroline Saccucci, Dewey Program manager for the Library of Congress, in a January 2014 report.
“The Arabic notation and hierarchical structure make this classification schema suited to use in any language,” wrote Saccucci. “Indeed, libraries in over 138 countries use the DDC, making it the most widely used classification system in the world. The DDC has been translated into 30 languages, and the editors of the Classification are frequently in discussions with translation partners around the world. Because libraries can shorten the class number for a more general classification, the DDC is ideally suited to smaller libraries of more general collections, such as school and public libraries.”
Though not a readily recognized name today, unlike his contemporary Dewey, Cutter’s influence on the organization of modern libraries is unsurpassed. Cutter’s codes and standards and developments in how catalogue records are communicated not only laid the groundwork for the Library of Congress Classification system but he also popularized the view that library catalogs ought to cross-reference subjects with authors’ names and titles, a practice that is almost universal now.
Both Cutter and Dewey were among the 103 librarians (90 men and 13 women) who founded as charter members the American Library Association at the “Convention of Librarians” on Oct. 6, 1876, during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world.
At the 1883 meeting of the American Library Association, Cutter presented a now famous prescient essay entitled The Buffalo Public Library in 1983, which elucidates a utopian future for American libraries and remarkably anticipates the technological advances of the 20th century, including inter-library loan, audio books, regional depositories, remote reference services and automated retrieval. You can read it here at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Buffalo_Public_Library_in_1983
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