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Michele Lockleair
LIS 604 Article Review 7
Dr. Carmichael
22 July 2016
Walker, C., & Copeland, A. (2009). The Eye Prophetic: Julia Pettee. Libraries & the Cultural Record, 44(2),
162-182. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25549546
In this article, Walker and Copeland give an account of the life of Julia Pettee, a major pioneer
in cataloging, classification, and the adaption of library tools for discrete user communities (162). Her
work professionalized the field of classifying and cataloging and led to the creation of the AngloAmerican Cataloging Rules and the Paris Principles of the 1961. She went against her families wishes and
attended college at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and College taking the seminary course. After
graduation she could not support herself and went back to college, but she was only able to afford her
first year, so she instead attended Pratt Institute to learn librarianship. Her practice was completed at an
off campus library in Brooklyn, New York, which was operated by Pratt Institute for the training of their
librarians. It was during this time that she would hear Lyman Abbot preach at the Episcopalian Plymouth
Church, which some believe guided her later choices in her theology work. She still felt finishing college
would give her more job opportunities and with financial help from a friend enrolled at Vassar College
after graduation from Pratt, where she worked part-time in the college library to pay her tuition. She
received her Bachelors of Arts degree and took one year of graduate classes. After graduating she was
offered a full-time position at the Vassar College Library. This led to amazing opportunities when the
college was closed during the summers and she was able to take outside work.
The University of Pennsylvania invited her to spend a summer helping to revise their catalog.
After this she was asked to help organize a new public library in Greene, New York. She later was invited
to reorganize the Rochester Theological Seminary Library, which housed over 50,000 volumes after a
conversation with a patron at Vassars recently opened Thompson Library. Not knowing anything about
the classification systems used for religious works, she prepared for the job by traveling to other

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theological libraries to assess their collections. She saw that they used several different systems and
none were adequate for the collections or patrons. She ended up spending two summers as well as
taking a half-year leave from Vassar to work at Rochester. It was here that she began devising a
specialized classification system for theological works.
She chose to use a system in use at Hartford Theological Seminary based on Alfred Caves late
nineteenth century work An Introduction to Theology: Its Principles, Its Branches, Its Results, and Its
Literature. She created an original classification system based off Hartfords system. She also decided to
divide the library into theological works and general works. The general works were cataloged using the
Dewey system and the theological works were classified using her system. This work led Union
Theological Seminary in New York City to request Pettee to head their reorganization project.
Unions system was chaotic and difficult to use, even for staff. Pettee reorganized the library
using both author/title and subject headings. Over the next fifteen years she perfected her system
which made her a noted authority on classification (172). She was even invited to reorganize the
religious works at the Library of Congress, but she declined so she could finish her work at Union. In
1939 she published Classification of the Library of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. At
least fifty other libraries adopted her system and the Union system is still in use today. Pettee retired
from Union, but took a part-time position at Yale University reclassifying their religious books. She
continued to revise her system for use in a large general library (175) based on subject headings.
Pettee said that the classification of knowledge is a living, growing thing, and the cataloger
must leave room for ideas that have not been discovered yet, so the classifier must be a prophet
(174). She believed that the classifier needed to understand the needs of the user for subject headings
to be useful as well as provide access at different levels of specificity based on the collection itself.
Pettee was appointed to the American Library Associations Code Revision Advisory Committee. Her

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principles live on and were used in the creation of FRBR Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records.
This article presented a look at an amazing woman and her incredible work in the library
profession. She was not afraid to make changes and step out at a time when women were second class
citizens and not respected for their intelligence in most circles. She was a pioneer and a visionary and
her work continues to inspire.