Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/librarian-congress-weighs-why-card-catalogs-matter-180963371/

by Tomte • 3 years ago

66 19 3 years ago

Back when I was 16, I got a summer job earning exactly minimium wage (yes, Federal Min wage... it was a job grant to employ youth in public service for the summer) at the county library. It was located in an old Carnegie building! They had an electronic catalog- but they still had the card catalog as well. It had not been updated for some time, though. So as part of my job (sometimes there wasn't much for me to do), I took it upon myself to update it. I think I impressed the older ladies that worked at the library- I not only knew what the card catalog was, but how it worked and how to operate the mechanical typewriter to type up new cards for new books that had been added to the collection.

Not long after this, the library moved to a brand new building. The card catalog did not make the move to the new building. I may have been the last person to have updated it.

Roark66• 3 years ago

Discarding of these catalogs is a huge mistake. What if there is no power? What if there is a war, the IT system breaks and no one is able to fix it for the lack of parts and eventually lack of knowledge? These records are too valuable not to have a physical human readable backup.

What is the excuse? "The company that printed the cards went out of business" I bet there is a lot of companies that could print a batch of such cards upon order. How hard would it be to set up a printer that filled and updates the cards and the it system to be in sync?

I remember using libraries without computerised catalogs for a long time. When I used electronic search for the first time I thought it is huge. I could find stuff in minutes instead of hours (or asking a librarian to do the search for me). However, it t is extremely short sighted to just discard or let these old catalogs to rot.

bregma2• 3 years ago

One of the problems with much of the modernizing drive of going all-digital is that there is no failsafe. No workable fallback. Usually skipped for "efficiency" (meaning some Excel spreadsheet was used to manipulate the numbers and a pivot table added to a slide deck in a presentation to the board resulted in earning that quarterly bonus for someone).

We're seeing more and more problems arise because of the lack of a failover plan. All it would take is a small printer to generate a new car from the digital system whenever a new item is added to a library's collection, and for someone to file the card just like they do the book (or do they still have physical books in libraries? ).

richiebful1• 3 years ago

The card catalog is just an index though. It can be regenerated from scratch with a few days/weeks effort for your little neighborhood library. In the mean time, the books are still on the shelves, organized by subject or author last name (typically)

atrettel• 3 years ago

Card catalogs are still used in many archives and libraries, especially when the cost to digitize them in either time or money is prohibitive. I visited the National Air and Space museum archives once to access a special collection, and one of the main ways they still found documents in this collection was through an old card catalog, though they did have a digital database of most of the information in the card catalog. I only needed to use the digital database but I did also locate one document I was looking for via the card catalog to see how the collection was organized originally. I think card catalogs will continue to be used for certain special collections for a long time.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

When I was a teen in the 1980s my local public library had already digitized their card catalog. They had terminals placed around the building where you could query it.

irrational• 3 years ago

Huh, when I was in college in the mid to late 90s, the school library still used a card catalog. Imagine a card catalog for millions of books. It was huge.

oldbbsnickname• 3 years ago

C. 1990, I volunteered in the library at the middle school I was attending. The checkout machine was a then antiquated green phosphor monochrome Apple IIe with a fixed laser scanner wand shape like a large pen that had to be dragged across a barcode.

Although this was before the internet and the Internet, there was a large, single purpose, DOS-based computer with a searchable encyclopedia and a Library of Congress catalog.

Dewey Decimal Classification represent.

skipkey• 3 years ago

On a related note, I would really like to buy a used card catalog cabinet, but they’ve seemed excessively expensive when I’ve seen them.

prepend3• 3 years ago

They’re perfect for storing collectible card games. A friend of mine has been trying to buy one for 10 years and they are really expensive.

He’s convinced he’ll eventually find a surplused one for nothing. But I think many others feel the same.

vintermann• 3 years ago

Card catalogs are often the only index into something people have stopped caring (much) about. They've been tremendously useful to me in my genealogical research.

martyvis• 3 years ago

Sadly the article this refers to that talks about the demise of catalog cards, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/card-catalog-dead-..., has links to the company that printed cards, OCLC, that are also now dead - https://www.oclc.org/support/services/worldcat/documentation... At least the catalog cards would have given you better information than the 404 errors (which would have been live only 8 years ago).

prepend3• 3 years ago

I think that physical representations of data will become more and more important and useful.

Like a totem, a card catalog isn’t really needed anymore but it represents something and may as well have something like that in the “real world” as the interface to the actual info.

I used to wear a mechanical watch not because it told time but because it was a physical thing that represented complexity and architecture and time. etc etc

As a kid, I read these books by Gordon R Dickson, the Final Encyclopedia. And the it was a giant place that had all the information in the universe and an AI to sort and deliver it. But it was neat because it was a place, like a temple. This was before the internet so it really could be distributed, but the idea of having limited interfaces stuck with me as a kid.

lioeters• 3 years ago

Your comment made me imagine a "card" catalog where each card is some kind of wireless transparent display or e-ink screen. It would provide a tacticle, physical representation of data that one could flip through to navigate the information space. It would be costly, and probably not practical or useful at all, haha.

Speaking of card catalogs, every time this topic comes up, it reminds me of a book I really enjoyed about index cards.

Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.

Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220531211447/https://mitpress....

jzb• 3 years ago

I really, for absolutely no good reason, desperately want to own a old style wood card catalog. Card catalogs conjure some powerful memories for me of flipping through school and local library card catalogs to find things specifically and speculatively.

Yes, computer search is better in many ways, but I miss the tactile experience of riffing through the cards and the minor archeology of finding "ancient" cards of books that had been in the collections for decades amid crisp new cards for recent releases.

seanc• 3 years ago

When I explain database indexing to new folks I start with a mini-lecture on card catalogs, complete with images. Even young folks who never saw one can _very_ quickly understand what it's for and how it works. And then when you point out that a database index is pretty much the same thing a light bulb goes off.

"Why does a new index cost disk space?" "It's a whole new wooden cabinet"

"Why is re-indexing expensive?" "Look at all those cards! Each one needs to be regenerated"

And so on.

Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

Related Stories