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What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

washingtonpost.com

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Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#51

Post by philjohn »

moftz wrote: post #12
norea-armozel wrote: post #2

I think the problem I have with modern election search is that often presented with what I don't want and I have to craft my query to get a decent list of sources. Mind you, this was way back in 2009 at Wichita State but the experience always seem to come up even when I use Google Scholar or equivalent modern search indices. They always seem to be off in terms of accuracy and relevance on the searches (especially now…

But going back to a card catalog system, you can really only search in ways that someone else has created. You can't search by words within an article, you can't search using regular expressions (or at least some boolean operators), and you can only find things as fast as you can thumb through a stack of cards. At least with a search engine, if I type in a query that isn't going to find me what I'm actually looking f…

Not only that, but it's often the way that Librarians are trained to search, but not how the rest of us do.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#52

Post by logfromblammo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #31
galonk wrote: post #8

What an incredibly stupid article. The author is supposed to be talking about card catalogues, but then keeps talking about books and libraries. We're not getting rid of those, we're getting rid of card catalogues. Somehow I don't think we should force librarians to keep hand-writing or typing cards for every book, or deprive users of search functions, just for this idiot's BS Wes Anderson aesthetic.

You're really missed the point that was being made. It's not a paean to the superiority of card catalogs, but regret for the loss of a time when they delineated the scope of information storage relative to the scope of service provision (the library itself). Librarians are rarely seen as custodians of knowledge, and their job has been downgraded to mere cataloguing. More troublingly, while the the physicality of a ca…

Librarians are custodians of knowledge and dangerous magical artifacts.

...According to TNT.~

Real librarians have become somewhat less prestigious as their previous roles have been automated. They are now little more than administrators of the information service provider of last resort for poor people.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#53

Post by anigbrowl »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #10

> 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.

Self-reinforcing productivity differentials.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#55

Post by tpeo »

aqsalose wrote: post #44
scottLobster wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. 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 a…

What do you mean by "in the long run"? Because a library being rendered unusable for a definite length of time wouldn't be a problem in the long run unless we're talking about a system with path dependence. And even if there is some path dependence, it's not quite obvious whether or not that's a major problem. For example, not being able to lend a book during a few hours could be only thing preventing some terminally-ill genius from solving some elusive mathematical problem before he dies, while everyone else can just try to check their books some other day when the power is back on. But so long as the problem can be solved, the solution might be found out later on by someone else.

On the other hand, if libraries are rendered unusable for an indefinite amount of time, or if they become so unreliable that they aren't even worth the effort, those would always be an issue regardless of whether there's path-dependence.

But it sounds somewhat far-fetched to create system to ensure the reliability of libraries in the event of say, a massive solar flare. Plus, it misses the point: in the event of something able to take out something crucial to the entire US library system for any appreciable length of time, the librarians themselves would most likely have far more pressing concerns in their hands. And that would be our new single point of failure.

I pretty much agree with scottLobster. Unless we're talking about developing countries, where electric power is not so much intermitent as unreliable - whereas it might take a hurricane to cause power outages in other countries, a gush of wind here will do - it makes sense to have a system like this in place.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#56

Post by danso »

eesmith wrote: post #49
danso wrote: post #26

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.

If that interests you, read more about S.R. Ranganathan, who introduced faceted classification and Otlet's work with Mundaneum and the Universal Decimal Classification. 100 years ago it was possible to search ~10 million records.

Thanks for the tip! Looking at the "Card Catalog" book on Amazon [0], I see it seems to be more of a photo book more suited for coffee table reading.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#57

Post by twic »

nkrisc wrote: post #3

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.

> 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'm not sure it's that simple. On the subject of libraries in particular, Z39.50 is thirty years old now, and it's still scary and bad.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#58

Post by bykovich2 »

When I was in college, my school was disposing of their card catalog by providing the cards as scratch paper for catalog numbers -- next to the computer terminals that had replaced them. I spirited dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out. I was particularly happy to have preserved some of the cards for the Asian languages collection, which had -- due, I presume, to the limitations of typewriters -- been written by hand.

I have them boxed up somewhere. They're not very interesting, all said, but I could certainly digitize them. I can't decide if that would be an insult or an enshrinement.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#59

Post by PhasmaFelis »

First comment on the article is extremely relevant:

> It's almost always non-working-librarians who evince such passionate nostalgia for antiquated technology such as card catalogs, just as I'm sure it's usually non-working-engineers and non-working-mathematicians who passionately yearn for the days of slide rules and good old pencil and paper, rather than these dang new-fangled computers. (Oh, and yes, just for the record, I do appreciate card catalogs as beautiful and evocative historical artifacts, but nothing more than that. As a working librarian, I would absolutely not want to have to go back to working exclusively with them. Take my word for it, no one in my profession would.)

That matches my experience. I've worked with librarians, and they are invariably excited about the power of computers and the internet. That's because their driving passion is free and easy information access for all, not nostalgia for the texture of the page and the smell of old paper.

Re: What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

#60

Post by PhasmaFelis »

bykovich2 wrote: post #58

When I was in college, my school was disposing of their card catalog by providing the cards as scratch paper for catalog numbers -- next to the computer terminals that had replaced them. I spirited dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out. I was particularly happy to have preserved some of the cards for the Asian languages collection, which had -- due, I presume, to the limitations of typewriters -- been written by hand.…

I think that would be entirely appropriate. A major goal of modern library science is to digitize rare and crumbling old books for the benefit of all patrons, present and future. I'm glad we switched to digital catalogs, but using the new methods to enshrine their own foundational technology seems deeply poetic.
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