View from the Top: The Library Administrator’s Changing Perspective on Standardization Schemes and Cataloging Practices in American Libraries, 1891–1901

In the preface to a work entitled Subject Headings (1946), author Julia Pettee reflects on the state of cataloging science in 1895, the same year she graduated from the Pratt Institute Library School. “To the rank and file of catalogers,” she writes, “the idea that the dictionary catalog had any relation to a systematic classification of knowledge had not dawned. We revelled in the new A.L.A. List of Subject Headings then just published.” ¹ With the benefit of hindsight, Pettee’s last sentence reveals more than she recognizes. First, it implicitly acknowledges a changing environment surrounding the nation’s library community at the beginning of the Progressive era. Second, it provides a partial explanation for the movement away from an emphasis on the individual library uniqueness which characterized the nineteenth century library and towards an emphasis on the general library standardization which characterized its twentieth century successor.