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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

#91

Post by amelius »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #90
Aloha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Card Catalog in my opinion had one benefit - Discoverability. In the libraries I grew up using, often the books had library bindings with no dust jacket. There was very little discoverability when you wanted to find something to read.. to explore. The card catalog filled that, and was all in one place, so I could sit there and thumb thru the cards and maybe find a couple-three books to go thumb thru to find somet…

How is a card catalogue better than Amazon or Goodreads, for discoverability?

Well, at least you can be sure that it doesn't put you in an information bubble.

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

#92

Post by pluma »

nl wrote: post #89
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.

This is so true. On HN a few months ago I came across someone claiming that web search was fine before Google and the only reason Google got popular was superior marketing. I found that so completely shocking to me that someone didn't remember how bad it was. Then I realised that was nearly 20 years ago, and it was really only 7 years or so when search was bad. I'd never felt so old before.

I can't be the only person to remember using search aggregators (aka "meta search engines") because every individual search engine was so bad and incomplete on its own, especially outside the US.

The "major" search engines before Google were Yahoo and Altavista, who were too busy trying to sell you a foggy concept of being "the Internet's start page" to be of any practical use when you actually wanted to find something specific. And of course plenty of people were stuck in their own ridiculous AOL microcosm.

Not only were the search engines lackluster and incomplete, the search results were also simply not very relevant. Often you'd only get good results because there simply wasn't enough content indexed for your queries to be in any way ambiguous but good luck if you were looking for anything you couldn't pin down to one or two very explicit search terms.

Kids these days don't know how good they have it with their Googles and their smartpads.

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

#93

Post by GuiA »

bumblebeard wrote: post #74
magic_beans wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And this was in 1998. Feels ridiculously irrelevant. Just like my third grade teacher who was adamant that we would only ever be able to write in cursive and in black ink in high school, college, and the workplace, and that to write in manuscript with pencils was not something any respectable adult would do...

I doing some work in a school just a year ago that still taught cursive to their students. I asked why and their response was pretty much just "because that's what you do in third grade." I don't get it.

"[...] These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/

Some educators specializing in dyslexia treatment point to research around cursive handwriting being a helpful tool:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/connecting-dots-role-cur...

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

#94

Post by boomboomsubban »

Aloha wrote: post #88
philipkglass wrote: post #22

I remember card catalogs. Modern electronic search is far superior. If searching the card catalog at the public library is "truly democratic," so is searching an electronic index at the public library. You can even perform full-text searches for words that the card-preparer might not have noted -- a huge advantage when researching niche topics that don't get their own books. https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanc…

The Card Catalog in my opinion had one benefit - Discoverability. In the libraries I grew up using, often the books had library bindings with no dust jacket. There was very little discoverability when you wanted to find something to read.. to explore. The card catalog filled that, and was all in one place, so I could sit there and thumb thru the cards and maybe find a couple-three books to go thumb thru to find somet…

>but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.

You're describing getting a random selection from a section, something computers are excellent at. Or you're talking about browsing things as a list, something else computers excel at.

The biggest difference on doing this on a computer is a loss of a sort of grime based review system. Something that could be seen as a benefit or detriment in different circumstances.

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

#95

Post by bonoboTP »

bumblebeard wrote: post #74
magic_beans wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And this was in 1998. Feels ridiculously irrelevant. Just like my third grade teacher who was adamant that we would only ever be able to write in cursive and in black ink in high school, college, and the workplace, and that to write in manuscript with pencils was not something any respectable adult would do...

I doing some work in a school just a year ago that still taught cursive to their students. I asked why and their response was pretty much just "because that's what you do in third grade." I don't get it.

You only learn to write cursive in third grade in the US? So you learn to write "print letters" first and then cursive? In Hungary we only learn cursive, and in first grade. As one gets older they generally move towards a mixture of that and print letters, though. Still I find some form of cursive to be much faster to write compared to print letters.

And even though I don't write huge letters and pages of text in handwriting, I do take notes and write scribbles to organize my thought very often. It's not like typing has replaced all use cases of handwriting.

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

#96

Post by rahimnathwani »

amelius wrote: post #91
rahimnathwani wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a card catalogue better than Amazon or Goodreads, for discoverability?

Well, at least you can be sure that it doesn't put you in an information bubble.

You can't be sure that your local library is free of regional or national bias. Sure, you might have a wider bubble by browsing cards randomly, than browsing recommendations on Amazon. But you could equally well browse Amazon somewhat randomly (e.g. by repeatedly clicking the least attractive book from the recommendation section).

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

#97

Post by titzer »

Well, karma be damned.

Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age.

Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 (http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor...), which could knock out power for months or years at a time.

We'd need a way to maintain society without organized computer networks, at least in those areas. Given how interdependent we are, one really wonders if society itself would not collapse.

I know, it's crazy. But imagine you woke up to a world without any computers or computer networks. Maybe that world is 1 year after such an event, or 20. How would you reboot society, or the very least, find and learn what you needed to learn? The answer would be a _library_.

Books will survive. At least, until we digitize and upload all of them, then throw them away.

Apparently we have already thrown away the paper copy of the index. This is extremely dangerous.

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

#98

Post by adrianN »

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.…

The archive.org guys might be interested in something like that.

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

#99

Post by mikekchar »

titzer wrote: post #97

Well, karma be damned. Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age. Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 ( http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor... ), which could knock out power for months or years at a time. We'd need a way to maintain society withou…

To be honest, I'm more worried about the lack of education we have these days. We seem to take for granted that a certain level of knowledge is unnecessary these days -- because we can just let the factories deal with it. How many people know how to make preserves? How many know how to make beer? How many know how to grow vegetables? How many know how to fillet a fish? It's just basic information that used to be common knowledge in every household -- it's already lost to the majority now. Of course we can relearn it from books, but I often think that together with this explosion of access to knowledge, we're already in a bit of a dark age. I suppose the cause is that most are uninterested. Even me, if I'm honest ;-)

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

#100

Post by halomru »

titzer wrote: post #97

Well, karma be damned. Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age. Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 ( http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor... ), which could knock out power for months or years at a time. We'd need a way to maintain society withou…

I agree that throwing away the physical books would be stupid, but the index is ready enough to rebuild if we ever need it again. And in a post-computer world search times in the order of days or even weeks would be acceptable: when looking up crop rotations a few days more or less won't make or break your harvest
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