Due to the pathway I am taking to qualify as a librarian I will probably only get to do one unit related to cataloging. That unit however is definitely scratching the itch related to the orthogonal position of the discipline of information science and its rabbit holes of definitions, standards, and systems. A constantly updated plethora of potentialities superseded, held on to, and further evolved.
The catalog evolved from a tool of record to a tool of search with the expansion of the size of library collections. I know that larger and larger libraries with family collections became fashionable in the Roman culture and I wonder what systems they used. In the ancient world collections of books could be recorded on clay or stone tablets. France after their revolution published the first comprehensive national system of cataloging. At what is now The British Library in 1841 the 91 rules of cataloging were published however the collection was never cataloged completely under this system demonstrating the resource constraints that metadata creation has always faced. The 91 rules did however form a basis for later cataloging systems in the 19th and 20th century. The most up to date catloging system previous to the wider adoption of computers appears to have been the Anglo-American system but this was retired soon after the beginning of the 21st century due to it originally not being designed to deal with digital objects and further and further additional appendices for specific examples in the modern world.
MARC or Machine Readable Cataloging was developed in the 60’s to allow the electronic transmission of records from one institution to another. This was not so much a standard for how to catalog however as a language to write the catalog in.
Modern reinterpretation of the nature of information and the behavior of users has led to IFLA’s Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records which is a conceptual framework rather than a standard with its division of records into WEMI or Works, Expressions, Manifestations, or Items. To describe for this framework there is currently RDA which stands for Resource Description and Access and represents modern rules for describing items into a catalog using any framework you like.