Rules for a Dictionary Catalogue / U. S. Bureau of Education Special Report on Public Libraries—Part II, Third Edition

WITH CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS AND AN ALPHABETICAL INDEX

Charles Ammi Cutter (March 14, 1837 – September 6, 1903) was an American librarian.

In 1876, Cutter was hired by the United States Bureau of Education to help write a report about the state of libraries for the Centennial. Part two of this report was his Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalogue (1876). This catalog was included in the organization's publication Public Libraries in the United States of America: Their History, Condition, and Management. Cutter implemented many ideologies familiar to contemporary librarians during his time at the Athenaeum. Cutter introduced characteristic structures and philosophies such as inter-library loan and furnishing every book with a pouch in the rear to encase a card in order to keep track of the item's circulating status.

Cutter served as editor of Library Journal from 1891 to 1893. Of the many articles he wrote during this time, one of the most famous was an article called “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983”. In it, he wrote what he thought a library would be like one hundred years in the future. He spent a lot of time discussing practicalities, such as how the library arranged adequate lighting and controlled moisture in the air to preserve the books.