Abstract
Classification is the founding act of all thought. In Penser/Classer, Perec found a middle way between the sentimental, memorial catalog and the library catalog, which corresponded to his professional life. Unable to put books away properly, Perec envisages classifying them according to their greater or lesser capacity to be put away, in a kind of dizzying mise en abyme of the library. At the end of this process, we find the trulyunclassifiable, the irreducible residue. In Perec's work, we find the fundamental aporia of any classification project, between the "illusion of the completed" and the "vertigo of the elusive".
To classify or not to classify, that is the question. In both cases, thought is involved. And that's what we need to highlight. We have unwillingly embarked on a journey through libraries that have been trying to classify their works for centuries. When we enter a library, this thought of classification can be expressed in a very concrete way: through card indexes stored in pigeonholes, in the case of an old-fashioned library. But this experience of life has ceased to be lectured upon since catalogs were computerized in the early 2000s. Today, they're all on the Internet.
Back in the days when paper files still existed, a visit to the catalog room was an initiation test. The digital relocation of catalogs has largely done away with this ordeal and feeling. Today, the catalog is the visible part of the library. It remains the gateway to the library, even for those who have not registered with the library. However, while this ubiquity makes entering the library less dramatic, it does not remove all the mysteries of consultation. There is a way of thinking about the catalog, a way of thinking that is more or less implicit and not always the way the cataloger thinks.
So what are catalogs thinking about? Catalogs by author or title express the thinking behind the library, the thinking behind the library's holdings, i.e. the thinking behind the books. Not all library collections express the same intensity of thought. A legal deposit library, a national library, thinks less than a smaller library, because the former welcomes all books as a matter of principle (that's its project), while the latter selects. There are also other parts of the catalog that express thought: the subject catalog and the call number.
