A Study of New Chronological Book Numbers

새 연대순 도서기호법의 연구

In most of the modern libraries throughout the world, it is popular to adopt the author number which arranges the books or entries in alphabetical order of their author's names within the same ultimate class. However, viewed historically, that was the Western practice never used in the East before. Traditionally chronological order was followed in the East. Book number not only individualizes the books within the same class but also makes it easy for the user to choose and find out the relevant materials. In this respect, chronological book number is decidedly superior to all kinds of book number systems ever have been existed. Especially in these days of rapid obsolescence of documents and with serious problems of storage of documents, the chronological order seems to be the most modern and future-oriented of all other book number systems because it distinguishes clearly new materials from aged materials by the date of publication and controls the stack spaces mechanically and effectively. This writer devised New Chronological Book Numbers adaptable to both the Eastern and Western materials, and the system has been adopted at Yonsei University Library. The features of the system are as follows: (1) It is easy to type the call number in cataloging the Eastern and Western materials. That is because the structure of the chronological number is pure numerical notation by taking the last two figures of the year within twentieth century(e.g. 85 for AD 1985), that is 1900s, and the last three figures of the year from twenty-first century to thirtieth century, that is 2000s. (2) It does not make all classes have chronological number uniformly. Within the classes for individual biographies, genealogies and collections of biography of specific family, books about individual organization, individual literary and artistic works, philosophical works of the famous philosophers, books and its facsmile editions published before 1900, new editions, translations, commentaries, serials, chronological number is assigned to the author number as in the past. (3) It separates the Eastern materials from the Western materials and makes the typing easy in cataloging. That is because the subarrangement within the same chronological book number is made by the accession order which uses 'panjol-ponmun' or the characters of basic syllabic table of Korean alphabet in case of the Eastern materials and Roman alphabet in case of the Western materials.