Death of a Cataloging Code

This chapter is about the politics of catalog code revision. It centers on the treatment of “institutions”- a class of corporate body that under the 1949 American Library Association (ALA) code had been entered in catalogs under the name of an associated place-locality or jurisdiction-but would, under a proposed revision of that code, be entered directly under their own names. In a broader sense, this chapter is also about another type of institution, our major research libraries-as key players in the process of code revision itself.