Contributions by Andrew Maunsell to the cataloging: a brief story of the heading “Bible”

Abstract

Introduction: Andrew Maunsell’s contributions have influenced the design of access points to catalog entries over the years since many of them is still in catalogs and in the Anglo-American cataloging rules such as the heading “Bible” used to gather the entries of this work in the catalog. Objective: To draw the historical context of the Londoner bookseller in order to know how he idealized the heading and how he used it in his time; and to exam historically how the heading "Bible" has been used in catalogs and later cataloging rules in order to investigate how the cataloging has appropriated that heading for representing the sacred work. Methodology: Bibliographic and documentary research. Results: The research finds that the cataloging has incorporated subheadings allusive to the attributes of the sacred work, which influenced the arrangement of the entries that work in vertical and horizontal dimension. Moreover, by the heading "Bible”, the cataloging was able to develop the groundwork and principles of uniform title to represent other works. But this has not always been done consistently because the uniform title has been unstructured by subheadings unrelated to the representation of the sacred work. In the face of the incoherence, the bibliographic models and the “Resource Description and Access” (RDA) were designed to reduce improprieties in cataloging such as the case of that subheadings. Conclusions: Despite the fact that there are some objections, the RDA is able to represent the Bible in the access points of the bibliographic records that refer to publications of that sacred work. Therefore, Maunsell planted cataloging practices that were watered by those who developed cataloging over the time.