The old library

Until recently the online catalog continued to contain records only for items physically held by the library system. As libraries have entered into cooperative relationships, this principle of telling "what the library has" has eroded. In union catalogs that contain records from libraries of more than one institution, the concept was expanded to "what at least one of the cooperating libraries has." More recently, the addition of Internet records has meant that a number of catalogs now contain records for "what the library can give access to," including "what the library has."

-- Arlene G. Taylor, The Organization of Information (Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2004), pg. 8-9.

The library of (let's say) 1875 to 1975 looked like this:

• The library would buy discrete and unchanging physical items to become part of a coherent collection.
• The library would catalog those items to identify their physical and intellectual characteristics and determine what library patrons would want from them.
• The library maintained a finding aid for those items (the card catalog) and the interface to that finding aid (the layout of a catalog card).
• The library would select every item in the library and controlled access to those items.

The bottom line for the libraries of 1875 to 1975:

• THE LIBRARY CONTROLLED EVERYTHING WITHIN THE LIBRARY.

That would change.