Yay, cataloging!

(Eisenstein, pp. 70-81.)

Any cataloging system is, of course, arbitrary -- even alphabetical order. Still, I'm struck by the late development of the latter. Anyway, given the small extent of most manuscript collections, and the lack of standardization, it is no wonder that indexing of these collections was haphazard at best. The memory of the "librarian" would be good enough for a small collection, and easier to "interface" with.