The Cataloging of Arabic Books

Abstract

r-rHlE University of Khartoum is a new university serving a country which until a few years ago had to look elsewhere for its higher education. The university . has developed from a secondary school established by a former British administration and has passed through the stage of an Overseas College in special relationship with the University of London, finally reaching complete autonomy as a university in 1956. The medium of teaching has always been English. Most of the teaching staff is European, but the majority of the students are and have always been Arabic-speaking (although there are a number of minorities). At the present time, teaching is carried out in in the departments of and Islamic Law; all other teaching is in English. The result of this history is a fairly large library of European books (mainly in English) on the subjects taught in the university, together with a certain number of works on subjects of general interest and a general reference section. The European books have been cataloged in accordance with the Anglo-American cataloging rules and classified by the Bliss Bibliographic Classification. In addition, there was a library of books in (including a few Persian, etc.) which had no catalog worthy of the name and a very rough-and-ready system of classification. A large number of these books were cheap, popular editions on economics, philosophy, etc., many of them translations of minor and out-of-date European textbooks. On my arrival in Khartoum, I was given the task of cataloging and classifying the library. The librarian and I agreed that a division of the library into two sections on the grounds of language was not justified, any more than a library in England would be justified in separating English and French books, and that this ought to be rectified. was the language of the country, and works should be included in their proper places in the library and given the same treatment as European works. We therefore thought that it would be better to limit the library only to literature and related subjects and to place all works on economics, etc., with the European books on the same subject under the Bliss classification. What we were actually doing was to change two independent libraries (one where the books were read from left to right and the other from right to left) into one homogeneous library organized under the same system. The idea was to have one sequence of subjects, irrespective of language, throughout the university library but keeping the subject Arabic Literature in the room where the old library had been. As the division was now by subject and not by language, books in different languages would be mixed on the shelves and to some extent in the catalogs, for European books on literature would be placed in the Arabic Literature section and books on other subjects would be placed with those subjects among the European books. The catalogs of books would have to be separate from the European,