Annotation: A Lost Art in Cataloguing

Public library catalogues in early twentieth-century Britain frequently included annotations, either to clarify obscure titles or to provide further information about the subject-matter of the books they described. Two manuals giving instruction on how to do this were published at that time. Following World War I, with the decline of the printed catalogue, this kind of annotation became rarer, and was almost confined to bulletins of new books. The early issues of the British National Bibliography included some annotations in exceptional cases. Parallels are drawn with the provision of table-of-contents information in present-day OPACs