Proposals That Preceded the Call Number: Shelf Arrangement in the Francofone Manuals of Librarianship from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1930.

Shelf arrangement, from a bibliographic perspective, constitutes a reading proposal of the collection to the users as well as a resource for management and access to the documents. However, the centrality of the call number testifies the near forgetfulness of the different proposals that came before it and the role of the collection of documents and the target audience in the elaboration of the organization, in addition to the overlapping of the bibliographic classification to shelf arrangement. This work is justified by the need to restore shelf arrangement, seeking to understand its fundamental aspects from the literature in which the activity was systematized. Thus, this paper aims at contributing to reorient the shelf arrangement as an activity of information organization, exploring its conformation in the Francophone literature, from the mid-nineteenth century up to the 1930s. As for the methodology, this is an exploratory research made possible through the historicalconceptual investigation of shelf arrangement found in the Francophone manuals of librarianship of that period. This study concludes that the activity was placed by that line since the nineteenth century, when its own terminology was developed under the consideration of the intervention of the contexts, using methods and guided by the diversity of proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]