Many of you with no formal library training or experience might someday have the pleasure of establishing or organizing a genealogy collection for your local society. If so, you will probably hear the terms "cataloging" and "classification" tossed around. I thought I'd use my sock drawer (really!) to illustrate what these words mean and why they aren't the same thing.

The famous Dewey Decimal System is a "classification" system, meaning that it sorts items into groups with other similar items. It’s kind of like your sock drawer: black ones here, white ones there, blue ones in between, and purple striped ones—well, they get their own special drawer.

The Library of Congress (LC) system is also a classification scheme. Neither of these schemes is ideal for genealogical use, which is why some societies have devised their own code numbers. But I digress.

To "catalog" a book (or microfilm, videotape, or periodical) is to create a record—a surrogate—and a full bibliographic description of it so that a library user need not have the item in hand to decide if it is worth looking at or if it is the precise book that might contain Grandma's passenger list.

Unlike a call number, which expresses what subject matter the book has "in common" with other books, the catalog record is used to express what makes that book "unique" from others in your collection.

Therefore, a good catalog record will identify the author or authors, the title, the place of publication, the name of the publisher, the date, the subject matter, the physical details (size, number of volumes, page numbers, and presence of illustrations, maps, or an index), and more. Assigning a call number is possibly the easiest part of the larger cataloging process.

So, a "catalog" of your sock drawer will describe each individual pair of socks: their makers, type of fiber(s), size, color, pattern, age, style or type, whether their mates are present or not, and which ones have Mickey Mouse^TM logos.

Though it is widely believed that library catalogers go home, fire up their PCs, and design databases of the contents of their dresser drawers for display on their personal Web sites, I can hereby testify that this is a bizarre urban legend with no basis in fact. Actually, we only get that obsessive about our spice drawers and record collections.

Cynthia Van Ness is a local history and genealogy librarian in Buffalo, New York, who still can't decide whether her nylon knee-highs belong in the drawer with pantyhose or the drawer with socks. Visit her Web site.