From Clay Tablets to MARC AMC: The Past, Present, and Future of Cataloging Manuscript and Archival Collections

To create a catalog is to bestow power; whoever uses a catalog gains control and access to whatever is being cataloged. Attempts to catalog written material go back to the days of clay tablets and proceed through the preparation of catalogs for medieval monasteries, printed book and card catalogs for libraries, calendars and other finding aids for individual manuscript collections, published guides to repository holdings, and union catalogs to the most recent form: online data bases