Islamic Libraries: A Resouce Guide

Once you have collected materials in various formats and accepted donations from people eager to help out when they hear it is a library that is opening in the masjid or Islamic center, you look around and begin to think ‘How am I going to make sense of this?' or 'How can I organize this so that others can find resources?’

Now it's time to organise your library collection. To help you do that you need to understand a little bit about what it means to catalogue (catalog) and classify materials. Below you will find information on how to sort your collection, organise it by format and subject, create a basic catalogue and classify materials in the collection.

A very brief but interesting account of how a small library organised its collection can be found here.

The document Libraries for All provides a very straight-foward explanation of how to get your library organised. It mentions first the need to sort all the materials you have into three:

1.    Non-fiction – these books generally contain facts about a subject, such as forestry or cooking.

2.    Fiction – these books are about imaginary situations, people and places. The main types of fiction are novels, plays, poetry and stories.

3.    Reference books– these books contain important information that people need frequently. Users are not generally allowed to borrow them so that everyone can have access to them in the library. They are often expensive and hard to replace. Examples include dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedias and almanacs. You may wish to include textbooks or other frequently used books in this category (see below).

The next step is to divide the books into smaller groups. Non-fiction books are usually sorted by subject, fiction books are sorted by author and reference books are usually sorted by type (e.g. dictionary, atlas, etc.). Fiction and reference materials are usually fairly easy to organise. However when it comes to non-fiction materials you need to spend more time in categorising the books so that those on the same subject are grouped together and are therefore easier to locate by users. 

Now that we understand a bit about the basic organsation of the collection, it is time to classify the materials.

A catalogue (or catalog) is a compilation or register of all the items (and their components) found in a library's collection.

What is Cataloguing?

Cataloguing is the process of recording vital information about an item. This would include name of author [writer] or composer; title of book or recording or DVD; publishers or producer's name, date of copyright/publication; ISBN [International Standard Book Number] or ISSN [International Serial Number] or other identifying number.

Cataloging (or cataloguing) rules have been defined to allow for consistent cataloging of various library materials across several persons of a cataloging team and across time. Users can use them to clarify how to find an entry and how to interpret the data in an entry. Cataloging rules prescribe

• which information from a bibliographic item is included in the entry;
• how this information is presented on a catalog card or in a cataloging record;
• how the entries should be sorted in the catalog.

The larger a collection, the more elaborate cataloging rules are needed.

MARC is an acronym, used in the field of library science, that stands for  MAchine-Readable Cataloging.The MARC formats, which are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and related documentation. .... widely used standards for the representation and exchange of bibliographic, authority, holdings, classification, and community information data in machine-readable form

Here are some samples of catalogue cards and MARC formats. - for book The history of the Quranic text.

Ever heard of the Dewey Decimal System (aka DDC)? Well, the Dewey Decimal System is a popular classification system used in school, public and small libraries all over the world to organise non fiction materials. Another classification scheme, the Library of Congress classification system, is used in academic and special libraries. 

What is Classification? 

Classification is the process of assigning subject relevant numbers to materials in order to group materials on the same topic together thereby making them accessible.

The Dewey Decimal system is a numerical scheme that organises information according to subject. While the DDC can meet some general needs of a collection in an islamic library, it does not provide adequate classification of subject matter pertaining to religions other than Christianity. This has been a problem facing librarians for a very long time. See Problems in Classification for some detials on this issue.  

A simpler one would be to create your own subject categories for the materials in your library especially if it is a very small collection. But bear in mind that you may have to alter this system when your collection grows. Besides, a standardized system as provided by the DDC has its advantages, such as sharing information with other libraries. I have attempted to devise an Islamic subject classification scheme but as of this date have not assigned numerical representations.

If you decide to use the DDC system for your library then follow these steps:

1. To figure out the DDC subject code for a book, first determine its subject as described in the DDC subject categories. Look through the book, the table of contents, and the index to determine the nature of the content ot suibject of the book. If the book has more than one subject, decide which one you think is the main or most important subject for your users.

2.Then look at the first ten DDC divisions (000 - 900). Which one describes your book the best? If you only have a few books in that category, then simply use this number as the subject code. If you have many books on that subject, however, you may want to give this book a more specific subject code to make it easier to find. Look at the hundreds divisions to classify the material if the subject matter is more specific and so on.

Once you understand the subject areas your collection and have assigned numbers to the items in the collection, it is time to create a shelf list.  

The Shelf List

A complete bibliographic listing of all the materials in the library according to their place on the shelves is called a shelf list. A shelf list makes it much easier for users to find a particular book and for librarians to do an inventory. A shelf list may be kept in a notebook or on cards (index card size) filed in a drawer. See Libraries for All page 50 for a really good description of how to create a shelf list for your library.