LC Catalog Information

[Joshua Knight]

Two people (Michael I. Bushnell, mike at turing.cs.unm.edu and Colin Plumb,
w-colinp at microsoft.uucp) have asked about information in the front of the
new book on 4.3 BSD internals:

 > What is the "88-22809 CIP"?

That's the Library of Congress (LC) card catalog number, i.e. the cataloging
of the book was the 22809th catalog entry in 1988.  Or some such.  If your
library has an LC card catalog, there's probably an explanation of the
fields somewhere about.  Many large university libraries used to have LC
card catalogs, I'm not sure what computerized data bases have done to that.
The information in the front of recently printed books (I looked at K&R
(1st ed) and the Minix book) seems to be just a copy of the LC catalog card.
Libraries used have all their catalog information on those little 3x5 cards,
and the Library of Congress is no exception.  I'm not sure what the CIP
indicates, but how about "Cataloging-in-Publication" which appears above
such information: "Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data"?

			Josh Knight
			IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
josh at ibm.com, josh at yktvmh.BITNET