This research aims to ascertain the conceptual basics underlying the design of the "Seven Epitomes", the first library catalog to establish the bibliographic model in imperial China. The analytical framework for the study consists of a reconstructed version of the catalog and its historical contexts. In analyzing the surviving text of the catalog, the study identifies its bibliographic objectives as the identification, choice, finding, and collocating objectives. Further deduced from these objectives, the study reasons out four general purposes that might be intended by the catalog's compiler Liu Xin: the catalog was to be a guide to literature, a plan for knowledge organization, a retrieval tool, and a library inventory. "Ru" classicism (or Confucianism) was the catalog's guiding philosophy. In classicism-dominated imperial China, generations of bibliographers followed this model and focused their attention primarily on making bibliography both a classicist guide to literature and a plan for organizing knowledge.