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Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#2

Post by ensignavenger »

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.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#3

Post by atrettel »

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.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#5

Post by oldbbsnickname »

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.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#7

Post by irrational »

SoftTalker wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#8

Post by Roark66 »

ensignavenger wrote: post #2

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),…

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.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#10

Post by martyvis »

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).
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