{"id":18296,"date":"2020-11-26T15:18:44","date_gmt":"2020-11-26T23:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18296"},"modified":"2020-11-26T15:18:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-26T23:18:44","slug":"cataloging-in-publication-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2020\/11\/26\/cataloging-in-publication-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Cataloging in Publication data"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019ve always wondered what those mysterious \u201cCataloging in Publication\u201d lines at the front of many printed American books meant.<\/p>\r\n<p>I knew they had something to do with the US Library of Congress, and they seemed to be an indication of where to file the book. They generally include the name of the author and some indication of the book\u2019s topics, and the book\u2019s ISBN. The topics are phrased a little oddly, but the general purpose of the author and subject lines seems relatively clear.<\/p>\r\n<p>But there are also more-mysterious parts. Like the line that says \u201cp. cm.\u201d Or the lines that give unlabeled strings of numbers and letters.<\/p>\r\n<p>So I recently went looking for more information, and found a page titled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thebookdesigner.com\/2010\/03\/cip-what-it-means-how-to-read-it-who-should-get-it\/\">CIP: What It Means, How to Read It, Who Should Get It<\/a>, and an AbeBooks \u201cAsk the Experts\u201d page about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.abebooks.com\/books\/rarebooks\/Avid-Collector\/Jan08\/ask-the-experts.shtml\">numbers on the copyright page<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>Among the things that I learned:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>The \u201cp. cm.\u201d line is the \u201cPhysical description of the book, almost always blank since the books are usually not yet published\u201d at the time when the CIP data is put together. Specifically, it\u2019s an indication of the page count and the book\u2019s size (in centimeters). As I understand it, those numbers are added to the Library of Congress\u2019s stored CIP data after the book is published. I\u2019m still confused, though, because I don\u2019t understand the value of putting that line in the printed book if it never shows the actual numbers.<\/li>\r\n  <li>One of the strings of numbers and letters is the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Library_of_Congress_Classification\">Library of Congress Classification<\/a> (LCC) number, which indicates the category that the book belongs in. (The LCC includes capital letters.) Another number, confusingly, is the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Library_of_Congress_Control_Number\">Library of Congress Control Number<\/a> (LCCN), which is unique to the book. (The first four digits are the year of publication.)<\/li>\r\n  <li>The number that ends with something like <i>dc21<\/i> or <i>dc22<\/i> is the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dewey_Decimal_Classification\">Dewey Decimal Classification<\/a> (DDC) number. The <i>dc<\/i> part indicates which version of the DDC system it\u2019s using.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-categories","category-ciphers-secret-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18297,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18296\/revisions\/18297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}