Optimism and enthusiasm – and doubts: from UDC towards hybrid cataloguing in the library of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

UDC was used in the library of the Stedelijk Museum until 1994, but initially only for a small minority of the books: those that were neither monographs nor exhibition catalogues. With the introduction of an automated system UDC was thrown overboard, books were shelved by size, and the catalogue now works with a thesaurus (more like a keyword list) loosely based on the AAT. Most questions from customers are for artists’ names, so that is the focus of the indexing effort, even for group exhibitions involving up to 30 or 40 names, while for the Stedelijk’s own catalogues, all the artists are always indexed.