Charles William Frederick Goss (1864–1946) was an English librarian, polemicist and cataloguing innovator.
He worked in Birkenhead and Newcastle public libraries, before becoming the first librarian in Lewisham (beating 300 other applicants to the post).
[4] Goss was a vocal opponent of the move to open access libraries (as opposed to closed access, where staff would fetch titles requested by readers, from the stacks)[2][5] In 1898 he obtained an apology from James Duff Brown in the course of their heated debate in the pages of the library press after threatening him with a libel action.
[3] He further attempted to improve the usefulness of catalogues as a search tool, by adding a short description, close to what would now be considered an abstract of the text.
[6] One such catalogue he produced was A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of George Jacob Holyoake for the Bishopsgate library.