Library management

Library management is a sub-discipline of institutional management that focuses on specific issues faced by libraries and library management professionals. Library management encompasses normal managerial tasks, as well as intellectual freedom and fundraising responsibilities. Issues faced in library management frequently overlap with those faced in managing non-profit organizations.

The basic functions of library management include, but are not limited to: planning and negotiating the acquisition of materials, Interlibrary Loan (ILL) requests, stacks maintenance, overseeing fee collection, event planning, fundraising, and human resources.

Most libraries that store physical media like books, periodicals, film, and other objects adhere to some derivative of the Dewey Decimal System as their method for tagging, storing, and retrieving materials based on unique identifiers. The use of such systems have caused librarians to develop and leverage common constructs that act as tools for both library professionals and library users alike. These constructs include master catalogs, domain catalogs, indexes, unique identifiers, unique identifier tokens, and artifacts .

A master catalog acts as a catalog of all domain or topic-specific catalogs and often directs the user to a more specific area of a library, where the user can find a more specific domain catalog. For example, upon entering a very large library, one may find a master catalog that will direct a patron to a specific wing of the library that focuses on a specific subject, such as law, history, fiction, etc.

In contrast, domain catalogs are usually made up of a system of very large libraries, where a master catalog cannot hold all of the system's information. As a result, the master catalog leads the user to domain catalogs that contain homogeneous references to specific artifacts that fall within the category or domain assigned to that catalog. For example, a very large library may have many domain catalogs—one for law, one for history, one for fiction, etc. In the case of smaller libraries where the use of domain catalogs are unnecessary, the master catalog can contain all of the information.

...
Wikipedia