Classification Method in Katip Celebi’s Ke？fü’z-Zun？n

The conception of the countless beings in the universe individually is a state that transcends the power and potentiality of the human mind. For this reason, the human mind creates classes based on some common characteristics found among the countless beings, and limits and conceives them through these classes. The classification contains within itself the intellectual structure and characteristics of the society in which the classification is made. Classification requires knowing and understanding the classified from different perspectives. This approach, which started in prehistoric societies, has become a sine qua non for the field of philosophy and science and has expanded to a classification system of institutional structure in nowadays archives, and that of the universal information in libraries. This study aims to investigate the concept of classification, to determine its general history in philosophy, science, library and archive, to address the classification studies in the Islamic world and the Ottoman Empire, and particularly explain the classification phenomenon Katip ？elebi’s bibliographical work, “Ke？füz-Zun？n”. The reasons for choosing Katip ？elebi’s work as a sample is; the work is one of the main reference sources among written literature within the Ottoman Empire, and especially in the phase of bibliographic research and determination; and while the number of books in the Ottoman libraries were at most five thousand in three libraries, Katip ？elebi introduces 14,500 books in Ke？füz-Zun？n. This study defends through a descriptive method and document analysis the hypothesis that the classification the approach in Katip ？elebi’s Ke？fü-Zun？n is significantly influenced by the influence and regime of the Islamic World and the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, this influence can be traced in the main structure of Katip ？elebi’s bibliographic work, both in its classification of knowledge/science and in its alphabetical order