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> A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that ... was truly democratic. I don't think I get how a digital library catalogue is less democratic than an analogue one? Is this just a poorly thought out and tossed off claim or is there something I'm missing.
"A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic." Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work, just like electron…
Worked OK for 400 years or so. Newspaper archives, too.
I haven't been a proper librarian in years. I miss it. We have a reading comprehension problem in the USA as of late. There are not alternative literacies but rather we gave up on the basics. Literacy should be universal yet isn't.
One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...) Library without catalog is, while not totally worthless, much more difficult to use. The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause…
If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about. If a hacker manages to destroy the database, well it's a good thing backups are cheap these days and it doesn't take a trained IT person to implement them. Even Crashplan or Carbonite, or just periodically copying files to an external drive and then disconnecting it wou…
Well, yes. But a library rendered unusable is also a major problem, in the long run. And especially if it's not just the local library, but all of them in the country?
I would probably need to read the book in question to be able to do Fermi estimates on what kind of amounts of paper and space the old system would need. But if one already has the "this is a backup system for very rare, very worst-case events, not for active use" viewpoint, one is free to do changes and optimizations. For example, miniaturized analogue backup from which the full-blown card system can be reproduced if the need arises.
"A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic." Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work, just like electron…
There's a lot of these going around these days, and while it's easy to dismiss them when they try to argue on the merits there is a certain value to them from a design perspective. Old-school analog systems were (to the user) tangible, comprehensible, predictable and repeatable in ways that digital systems often fail to match. You push a button and the device does a thing. You push that button 20 years later, still does the same thing. The response is also tactile and immediate, having a specific feel, sound and smell. Much the same reasons us CS nerds glorify mechanical keyboards.
I think a lot of apps/user facing products could improve from attempting to emulate analog systems more closely. People want a piece of software that they can use for 20 years without being thrown to the ground when the UX does a triple-360 in the next upgrade because someone thought it was "bad design". In the tech world we seem to gravitate towards this relentless, iterative, constantly changing march to perceived glory when perhaps shifting the balance back the other direction could be helpful.
Anyone remember taking Library Class? Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction? Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)
Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while. When it's new, it's scary and bad. I look forward to being 90 and reading about people wistfully remembering the simpler and more cultured bygone days of smartphones and Facebook.
While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile) I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best pa…
While I agree with the sense I get in general that modern, digital catalogs are better for search than the older, analog catalogs, I feel it has gotten worse for myself, and possibly others like me exist, that were not looking for something specific. I enjoyed the discovery possible by browsing through a card catalog - with lots of information without having to walk and scan through the stacks like I was looking for…
I think I'll check this book out. Taxonomy is still a hard problem in terms of digital information theory, so I'm interested in how it was managed in a system in which storage was scalability had much harder physical limits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire point of my discovery project was to NOT just use new kinds of card catalog cards, but to instead do discovery on individual sentences. I think that new kinds of card catalog cards could also be pretty novel and interesting, for example I'd love to build a histogram of all of the dates seen in a book and include that in the card catalog card.
It's a nifty technique, but I'm not sure it refutes my statement. You still have agents crawling the book to build an index of metadata by (in your experiment's case) subjects and years mentioned. You throw away the entries for subjects and years you're not searching for, because they're not needed for your specific problem, but that's an optimization. If you didn't do that, your agents would assemble what amounts to…