Introduction

Managing extensive data has become an increasingly important part of information work since digital modes of storage and manipulation became widely available during the last decades of the 20th century. The sense that we have transitioned into a data-driven digital age sometimes leads to a present-minded view that positions library data as a contemporary phenomenon, of interest principally for tracking the needs and interests of current users and professionals. However, libraries have always relied on structured data to manage their collections. While this data has proliferated and become more tightly networked in modern contexts, it has done so based on practices with deep historical roots. Records ranging from the fragmentary and casual to the punctilious and voluminous have been employed for logging orders, tracing purchases, organising shelving, allowing users to locate materials and tracking responsibility for books, both within collections and when volumes depart from library premises with borrowers. The modules of modern library software, such as Ex Libris Group's Voyager, covering processes including acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation, reservations and various forms of reporting, are digital instantiations of what, in older libraries, were paper lists, bound accounts, laboriously-compiled manuscript catalogues, hefty receipt books and often snippy records of collection audits (it is very common for 18th-century curatorial documents from Scottish university libraries to bemoan the poor condition of books and uneven compliance with requests for returns from the more senior members of the university community).