This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Charles Coffin Jewett is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Charles Coffin Jewett was born in 1816 in Lebanon, Maine. He began his library career at Andover Theological Seminary, where he prepared his first catalog. In 1841, he became the librarian of Brown University. He extensively rearranged that library, and created a subject catalog of its contents. He became Librarian and Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in1848, and published a survey of U.S. libraries. He also started mechanical duplication of individual catalog entries. Jewett left the Smithsonian after being relieved of his position due to some scandal. He went on to become Superintendent of the Boston Public Library in 1858, where he remained until his retirement in 1865.
Jewett had a vision for a national library, which would hold a union catalog of all the public libraries in the United States. This catalog would give scholars access to important books, point out differences in intellectual fields, and generally act as an aid to the evolution of knowledge. He spent the greater part of his life developing guidelines toward this end.
Jewett was a strong advocate for alphabetical catalogs, both because of their convenience to catalogers and their user-friendliness. However, he believed that catalogs should be no more than lists of titles, and contain no more information than what was included by the authors. On the one hand, it kept the costs of printing the catalog down, but on the other, it was not very thorough. His idea of the union catalog included the use of “stereotyped plates,” which was a set of mass-produced titles that were created according to a set of strict rules. Jewett was hugely concerned with uniformity, and believed that the only way to avoid confusion, no matter how difficult it made things for users.
Charles Jewett died in 1868.
Sources
Historical Development of Ideas Concerning Library Catalogues: Their Purpose and Organization, by Moya K. Mason [1]
Charles Coffin Jewett, by the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. [2]
 |
This library-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 20 November 2008, at 00:28.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Charles Coffin Jewett".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.