Cabinet Card

    An early photographic print mounted on 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inch card stock, often a commercial portrait or vignette with the photographer's imprint across the bottom or on the back. Early albumen prints are in sepia and later examples are in silver tones and rich blacks, printed on gelatin papers introduced in the 1870s. Easy to mass produce, cabinet cards appeared in the mid-1860s, replacing the wallet-sized carte-de-visite, and were sold up to about 1905 when the tinted picture postcard became popular. Click here to see a cabinet card portrait of Sigmund Freud's mother, Amalia, and here to see a vignette of Capt. Cornelius M. Schoonmaker (1839-1889), U.S. Navy. Synonymous with cabinet photograph. See also: imperial card photograph.

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Cable Modem

    A modem designed to operate over cable television lines, instead of telephone lines, providing faster data transmission because the coaxial cable used by cable TV companies has higher bandwidth. With millions of homes in the United States already wired for cable TV, Internet access via cable modem is growing.

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 Cable Television (Catv)

    Television service transmitted directly to subscribers via cable connection, rather than broadcast over the air to all who own receivers. Originally designed to extend service to homes in rural areas, cable TV reached nearly half the homes in the United States by the early 1990s. Today, cable systems deliver hundreds of channels, many providing specialized programming, to approximately 60 million U.S. homes, and high-speed Internet access to a growing number of people. Some cable systems allow subscribers to make telephone calls and receive new programming technologies, such as pay-per-view. Click here to learn more about cable television, courtesy of HowStuffWorks.

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Cache

    A small section of dedicated high-speed memory built into a microcomputer to improve system performance by providing temporary storage for blocks of data and instructions that would otherwise be retrieved from slower memory. As a general rule, the larger the cache, the greater the enhancement of performance and speed. Click here to learn more about caching, courtesy of HowStuffWorks. Pronounced "cash." See also: browser cache.

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Call Number

    A unique code printed on a label affixed to the outside of an item in a library collection, usually to the lower spine of a book or videocassette (see these examples), also printed or handwritten on a label inside the item. Assigned by the cataloger, the call number is also displayed in the bibliographic record that represents the item in the library catalog, to identify the specific copy of the work and give its relative location on the shelf. In most collections, a call number is composed of a classification number followed by additional notation to make the call number unique. This gives a classified arrangement to the library shelves that facilitates browsing. Generally, the class number is followed by an author mark to distinguish the work from others of the same class, followed by a work mark to distinguish the title from other works of the same class by the same author, and sometimes other information such as publication date, volume number, copy number, and location symbol.

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Campaign Biography

    The life story of a political candidate, issued at the time of his or her campaign for election to public office. The genre began in the United States in 1817 with the publication of The Life of Andrew Jackson by John Reid and John Henry Easton.

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Cancel

    A new leaf or leaves printed to replace part of a book or other publication when changes are required in the text or illustrations, usually before binding but after the work has gone to press, more common in the 17th and 18th centuries than today because as printing developed, the frequency of printing errors declined.

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Canceled

    Said of a regular order, continuation order, or periodical subscription terminated for some reason by the library or the seller. A nonserial item may be reordered if it is still available. Library holdings of a canceled serial title are noted in the catalog record in a closed entry. Serial cancellations have increased in recent years, particularly in academic libraries, due to the rising cost of print subscriptions and the availability of full-text in bibliographic databases. Compare with discontinued. See also: noncancellable.

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Cancellation

    In the context of medieval manuscripts, a superimposed "x" used to indicate a correction by crossing out one or more letters; a form of deletion. See also: expunction.

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Cancellation Period

    The period of time a library allows a publisher, jobber, or other vendor for shipment of a book or item before the order is automatically canceled, usually 90 to 180 days. The item may subsequently be reordered from the same vendor or a different source.

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Caption Title

    A title printed at the beginning of a chapter, section, or other major division of a book, or at the beginning of the first page of the text, which, in the absence of a title page, is sometimes used as the title of the whole in creating the bibliographic description. The cataloger usually adds Caption title: as a note in the bibliographic record to indicate its source. In a musical score, the title that appears immediately above the opening bars may be used as the caption title. Synonymous with head title. Compare with drop-down title.

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Captivity Narrative

    An account of the experiences of a person captured and held against his or her will, usually by an enemy or by members of a society or culture foreign to the captive. Accounts by men and women of European descent, captured by Native Americans, were popular in the United States and Europe from the colonial period until the close of the frontier in the late 19th century (example: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson by herself). Narratives based on journals written in captivity are generally less fictionalized than accounts written from memory after the event.

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Card

    A small, flat, rectangular piece of thin paperboard or stiff paper, specifically designed to convey a message or other information. When printed, cards may include graphic design. The category includes such ephemera as advertising cards, business cards, trade cards, collecting cards, comic cards, dance cards, greeting cards, membership cards, playing cards, postcards, sports cards, and visiting cards. See also: index card and catalog card.

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Card Catalog

    A list of the holdings of a library, printed, typed, or handwritten on catalog cards, each representing a single bibliographic item in the collection. Catalog cards are normally filed in a single alphabetical sequence (dictionary catalog), or in separate sections by author, title, and subject (divided catalog), in the long narrow drawers of a specially designed filing cabinet, usually constructed of wood (see this example). Most large- and medium-sized libraries in the United States have converted their card catalogs to machine-readable format. Also spelled card catalogue. Compare with online catalog.

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Card-Mounted Photograph

    A photographic print, often a portrait, mounted on a standard-sized piece of thin cardboard, popular during the second half of the 19th century. Common sizes (according to the California Historical Society):