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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

#101

Post by halomru »

mikekchar wrote: post #99
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 comm…

In any scenario where society or technology breaks down enough for these skills to be useful, the majority of the population still won't miss them. Without industrialised fishing and farming (which relies on oil and huge production chains) we don't have nearly enough fish for people to filet or grain for people to make bread (let alone beer). And statically speaking you will be starved before your vegetables are grown.

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

#102

Post by titzer »

halomru wrote: post #100
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

Rebuilding the index might require actually reading all the books over again. The whole point of an index is that it is 1000x smaller, so it makes absolutely no sense to throw away a paper copy of it.

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

#103

Post by logfromblammo »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #61
logfromblammo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. One of the reasons we still need librarians is that they understand that "information service provider of last resort for poor people" is a vital and noble service. I'm having trouble responding to this wit…

I also feel it is a vital and noble calling. But fewer people share our views now, as compared to 1970. And like it or not, the prestige of a profession strongly affects the number of people who seek to enter it.

Fewer will choose to become professional librarians when municipal library systems employ less with formal training, and task those who have it with serving the prurient interests of transients and homeless people.

Sure, some of those people will also be helped to create electronic resume documents, and to access job boards, and to enroll in online education courses, and to generally make their lives better via access to information, and that is what librarians want out of the job, but they will also be crapped on--both by those who feel entitled to the services they provide, and by those who feel they are obsolete relics.

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

#104

Post by cableshaft »

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…

You know the fun thing about computers and digitization? You can write software to export its data in a way that can be reprinted onto physical paper. I'm not sure if libraries do that, and I'm sure they wouldn't reprint each and every line on separate cards and store them in massive tombs still, but in theory they could have a hardcopy in a few massive binders somewhere. Of course it'll be out of date the instant it's printed, but that's true of old card catalogs too.

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

#105

Post by vidarh »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #94
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…

>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 o…

The big difference is potentially access to the "raw data" without being limited to the view someone has decided to grant access to. E.g many library search systems I've used would have been able to offer this kind of view of the data, but didn't. Then again others have offered far better views.

But I'd rather replace those bad systems with better ones than go back to a card catalog.

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

#106

Post by vidarh »

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.

To a lot of us there was a period where it felt like Google was inferior because while it was good, if you understood your space and knew which terms to carefully include/exclude in the search using search operators with Altavista for example, you'd be likely to get a better result. For a while.

But that was based on a web where the amount of information was "small" and of searching within small bubbles we knew well, and spending a lot of time refining searches.

What "made" Google was first making search "good enough" that casual searches would return good results without spending time tuning inclusion/exclusion or figuring out which terms were used for a given subject first. Suddenly search "worked" for a lot of people and instances where it didn't work before, and for a rapidly growing internet population that made figuring out how to make an engine like Altavista work totally pointless.

Altavista was "better" once you had a hyperspecialised set of skills around using Altavista. But that too only lasted until Google had improved their algorithms a bit more combined with people starting to pay attention to SEO. Out went the last niches where the old-style engines could compete.

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

#107

Post by acdha »

mistersquid wrote: post #66
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…

Like you, I look askance at the author's assertion that the card catalog is "truly democratic". Lindgren writes > 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. failing to explain that in order to access that card catalog, patrons would have had to travel from their homes all the…

> failing to explain that in order to access that card catalog, patrons would have had to travel from their homes all the way to Washington DC.

This is not strictly true: the Library of Congress sold copies which were widely used by libraries around the country in the pre-electronic era:

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0112/cds.html

> By the 1960s, CDS had become the Library's largest division, with a staff of some 600 people who shipped more than 78 million cataloging cards each year. This operation occupied floor space larger than a football field "including the end zones," said Ms. Mendenhall. "It was a monster that gave way to the miracle of MARC."

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

#108

Post by Maultasche »

pluma wrote: post #92
nl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somethi…

Oh yeah, before Google came along I used Metacrawler, which would search about 8 search engines and compiled the results. It was a big improvement over Webcrawler, which I had used previously. Searching was really bad back then compared to now. I remember having to wade through lots of irrelevant search results to find what I wanted.

The moment I discovered Google in early 2000, I dumped Metacrawler and never went back.

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

#109

Post by PhasmaFelis »

Noos wrote: post #81
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #59

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…

I don't know why they are, they are increasingly becoming the equivalent to a free net cafe. It's a ridiculously underpaid profession, partly because computers cost so much to maintain and service for them.

There are still too many people who don't have ready internet access. Free internet, and a librarian to help use it, can be vital to a homeless person trying to find work, for example.

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

#110

Post by nl »

vidarh wrote: post #106
nl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To a lot of us there was a period where it felt like Google was inferior because while it was good, if you understood your space and knew which terms to carefully include/exclude in the search using search operators with Altavista for example, you'd be likely to get a better result. For a while. But that was based on a web where the amount of information was "small" and of searching within small bubbles we knew well,…

I used altavista from when it was altavista.digital.com. The only time I remember it being better than Google was when Google only spidered the Stanford domain, and slightly later if you knew the page title you were looking for.

Also if you wanted Usenet search before DejaNews.

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