The sixth unwritten law of library science

Abstract

The five laws of library science, written by S. R. Ranganathan in 1928, drastically modified the idea of public library and oriented its evolution, placing the information needs of the reader at the center of its own reason to exist. However, there is a sixth unwritten law, which since 1851 has led the efforts of the international library community. This research draws the path and sets the milestones that identify this law, from Jewett’s Plan for Stereotyping Catalogues to IFLA’s Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) program.

Keywords

• Le cinque leggi della Biblioteconomia
• catalogazione centralizzata
• storia della catalogazione
• normalizzazione
• regole di catalogazione