Between myth and oblivion: a biography of Ákos Domanovszky

The life and career of Ákos Domanovszky, Hungarian librarian and scholar of library science, is almost unknown even in his own country, apart from an inner circle of scholars who consider his studies on library catalogue functions an essential contribution to cataloguing theory. He was a major participant in the ICCP (Paris, 1961) and the IMCE (Copenhagen, 1969); and the author of the Hungarian draft cataloguing code, adopted as a national standard in 1972. He published several important essays in national and international journals such as Libri, but his crowning achievement as a scholar was Functions and Objects of Author and Title Cataloguing (1974), which is discussed and analysed in this paper.