Charles Ammi Cutter, son of Caleb and Hannah Cutter, was born at his father’s house in Boston, Massachusetts on March 14, 1837. As a young man, Cutter enrolled at the Hopkins Classical School to prepare for his education at Harvard College, where he began college in 1851 at the age of 14. Cutter received his A.B. from Harvard in 1855. Between 1855 and 1856, he was unsure of his career path, so he tutored students and enrolled in a mathematics course at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific Institute before continuing his studies at Harvard Divinity School. In 1859, after completing his studies at the Divinity School, Cutter did preach a few sermons at the First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but he was never formally ordained as a minister. This proved to be good fortune for the library community, as Cutter is an important historical figure in American Library Science.
From 1857 through 1859, while attending Harvard Divinity School, Cutter was a student librarian at the Divinity School library. Cutter and a Harvard graduate student were responsible for cataloging the Library’s original collection. The two created a two volume catalog of the collection. The second volume of the catalog was entirely in Cutter’s clear and legible handwriting. For the next year, Cutter spent another year as a tutor, while working on an independent study.
In 1860, after graduating from Harvard Divinity School, Cutter was appointed Assistant Librarian to Mr. Ezra Abbott at Harvard College Library, where he served until 1868. While at Harvard College Library, he developed a new form of index catalog, using cards instead of published volumes, containing both an author index and a rudimentary form of a subject index.
On January 1, 1869, he began his service as the librarian at the Boston Athenaeum. While at the Boston Athenaeum, Cutter was a pioneer in the field of subject cataloging. Cutter created The Athenaeum Catalog, which was a five volume set, that was published one volume at a time in 1874, 1876, 1878, 1880, and 1882. This catalog served as a model for later dictionary catalogs. In 1875, Cutter created the Rules for a Dictionary Catalog, the first work of its kind, which is a classic work in library science. In 1876, Cutter and 100 or so others founded the American Library Association and the Library Journal, of which he was the editor from 1881 until 1893.
Cutter's most significant contribution to the field of library science was the development of the Expansive Classification system. This system influenced the development of the Library of Congress classification system. As part of his work on this system, he developed a system of alphabetic tables used to abbreviate authors' names. This system of numbers ("Cutter numbers") is still used today in libraries.
From 1894 until his death in 1903, Cutter served as the librarian at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. Cutter built the library from its meager beginnings to over 90,000 carefully and personally selected volumes. Cutter passed away at the age of 66 in Walpole, Massachusetts on September 6, 1903.
Top of PageCutter's Expansive Classification System
The Cutter classification has to be the most logical and scholarly of American classifications. Cutter developed this classification system when he was trying to rearrange the collection at the Boston Athenaeum Library. He started to use the Dewey Decimal System, but abandoned that system because he did not like it because it did not afford him the minuteness he desired. Cutter decided instead of using numbers, he would employ the alphabet, so he would have more flexibility for subdivisions. Even then he feared he would have too few subdivisions, so at Dewey's suggestion he added ten classes with numerical notation. While very few libraries adopted this system, the Expansive Classification outline served as a basis for the widely adopted Library of Congress classification system, which also took over some of its features.
The general arrangement, created during the third classification, of the main classes of the Cutter classification system follows:
Cutter, William Parker. Charles Ammi Cutter. Chicago: American Library Association, 1931.
Miksa, Francis L. Charles Ammi Cutter: Library Systematizer. Littleton: Libraries Unlimited, Inc., 1977.
Miksa, Francis. The Subject in the Dictionary Catalog from Cutter to the Present. Chicago: American Library Association, 1983.
Top of PageThis page was created for Dr. Gretchen Whitney, IS 490 - Information Environment at The University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences in conjunction with the Dead Germans Project.
The photo of Charles Ammi Cutter is courtesy of the University of Maryland website.
Created on November 15, 2004/Last Revised on November 17, 2004.
Page design © Susan Wolford, 2004. All rights reserved.