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Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#11

Post by bregma »

Roark66 wrote: post #8
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 o…

One of the problems with much of the modernizing drive of going all-digital is that there is no failsafe. No workable fallback. Usually skipped for "efficiency" (meaning some Excel spreadsheet was used to manipulate the numbers and a pivot table added to a slide deck in a presentation to the board resulted in earning that quarterly bonus for someone).

We're seeing more and more problems arise because of the lack of a failover plan. All it would take is a small printer to generate a new car from the digital system whenever a new item is added to a library's collection, and for someone to file the card just like they do the book (or do they still have physical books in libraries? ).

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#12

Post by prepend »

I think that physical representations of data will become more and more important and useful.

Like a totem, a card catalog isn’t really needed anymore but it represents something and may as well have something like that in the “real world” as the interface to the actual info.

I used to wear a mechanical watch not because it told time but because it was a physical thing that represented complexity and architecture and time. etc etc

As a kid, I read these books by Gordon R Dickson, the Final Encyclopedia. And the it was a giant place that had all the information in the universe and an AI to sort and deliver it. But it was neat because it was a place, like a temple. This was before the internet so it really could be distributed, but the idea of having limited interfaces stuck with me as a kid.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#13

Post by prepend »

bregma wrote: post #11
Roark66 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

One of the problems with much of the modernizing drive of going all-digital is that there is no failsafe. No workable fallback. Usually skipped for "efficiency" (meaning some Excel spreadsheet was used to manipulate the numbers and a pivot table added to a slide deck in a presentation to the board resulted in earning that quarterly bonus for someone). We're seeing more and more problems arise because of the lack of a…

The failsafe is backups.

This is such a trivial problem to solve. In fact, libraries are really good for distributed storage so have a peer to peer replica all over the world.

Libraries are trustworthy and stable so good spots to distribute 100 durable replicas of the catalog data.

If you’re worried about surviving Armageddon or something then that’s a different problem. Not that the books will likely be around, but I suppose you could dump the data out to records or something and bury it under the library and that’s more likely to survive whatever takes out the library.

But I think a digital copy of the catalog distributed around the world and into space is more likely to survive.

That might be a fun project, to broadcast the data out into space at something that will reflect it back in 10-100 years so we’ll have a copy coming back to us in the future. Is that possible, astronomically?

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#14

Post by prepend »

skipkey wrote: post #6

On a related note, I would really like to buy a used card catalog cabinet, but they’ve seemed excessively expensive when I’ve seen them.

They’re perfect for storing collectible card games. A friend of mine has been trying to buy one for 10 years and they are really expensive.

He’s convinced he’ll eventually find a surplused one for nothing. But I think many others feel the same.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#15

Post by lioeters »

prepend wrote: post #12

I think that physical representations of data will become more and more important and useful. Like a totem, a card catalog isn’t really needed anymore but it represents something and may as well have something like that in the “real world” as the interface to the actual info. I used to wear a mechanical watch not because it told time but because it was a physical thing that represented complexity and architecture and…

Your comment made me imagine a "card" catalog where each card is some kind of wireless transparent display or e-ink screen. It would provide a tacticle, physical representation of data that one could flip through to navigate the information space. It would be costly, and probably not practical or useful at all, haha.

Speaking of card catalogs, every time this topic comes up, it reminds me of a book I really enjoyed about index cards.

> Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.

Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929 - https://web.archive.org/web/20220531211447/https://mitpress....

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#16

Post by jzb »

I really, for absolutely no good reason, desperately want to own a old style wood card catalog. Card catalogs conjure some powerful memories for me of flipping through school and local library card catalogs to find things specifically and speculatively.

Yes, computer search is better in many ways, but I miss the tactile experience of riffing through the cards and the minor archeology of finding "ancient" cards of books that had been in the collections for decades amid crisp new cards for recent releases.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#17

Post by gmcharlt »

bregma wrote: post #11
Roark66 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

One of the problems with much of the modernizing drive of going all-digital is that there is no failsafe. No workable fallback. Usually skipped for "efficiency" (meaning some Excel spreadsheet was used to manipulate the numbers and a pivot table added to a slide deck in a presentation to the board resulted in earning that quarterly bonus for someone). We're seeing more and more problems arise because of the lack of a…

Fun fact: the MARC format, used for bibliographic metadata by the majority of libraries that have digital catalogs, included supporting the printing of catalog cards as one of its use cases [1]. To this day a properly maintained library catalog based on MARC could, with some effort, be used to generate an equivalent set of printed catalog cards.

However, printed catalog cards as a backup to the digital catalog have practical problems. For one thing, they are heavy. A full card catalog of a large public library could easily weigh tons [2] and take up space that would be better used for other functions. For another thing, the expense would detract from other library services, and many libraries already suffer from budgetary challenges.

A proper backup strategy is the way with the risk of losing the digital catalog. Besides, libraries have more fundamental problems to deal with regarding the permanence of electronic resources. For example, the fact that libraries largely do not and cannot _own_ the ebooks they circulate causes numerous problems.

[1] https://www.allpurposeguru.com/2021/03/henriette-avram-and-t... [2] https://blogs.loc.gov/preservation/2022/10/moving-card-catal...

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#18

Post by seanc »

When I explain database indexing to new folks I start with a mini-lecture on card catalogs, complete with images. Even young folks who never saw one can _very_ quickly understand what it's for and how it works. And then when you point out that a database index is pretty much the same thing a light bulb goes off.

"Why does a new index cost disk space?" "It's a whole new wooden cabinet"

"Why is re-indexing expensive?" "Look at all those cards! Each one needs to be regenerated"

And so on.

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#19

Post by richiebful1 »

Roark66 wrote: post #8
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 o…

The card catalog is just an index though. It can be regenerated from scratch with a few days/weeks effort for your little neighborhood library. In the mean time, the books are still on the shelves, organized by subject or author last name (typically)

Re: Why Card Catalogs Matter (2017)

#20

Post by bregma »

prepend wrote: post #13
bregma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems with much of the modernizing drive of going all-digital is that there is no failsafe. No workable fallback. Usually skipped for "efficiency" (meaning some Excel spreadsheet was used to manipulate the numbers and a pivot table added to a slide deck in a presentation to the board resulted in earning that quarterly bonus for someone). We're seeing more and more problems arise because of the lack of a…

The failsafe is backups. This is such a trivial problem to solve. In fact, libraries are really good for distributed storage so have a peer to peer replica all over the world. Libraries are trustworthy and stable so good spots to distribute 100 durable replicas of the catalog data. If you’re worried about surviving Armageddon or something then that’s a different problem. Not that the books will likely be around, but…

> The failsafe is backups.

Backups are not a failsafe.

Firstly, backups are not an emergency plan. Restoring backups is the emergency plan, and that needs to be tested and verified on a regular basis. Making backups without validated restoration is just theatre,

Second, a backup is not a failsafe. A failsafe is something that lets you keep working in the event of a failure. It's not something that lets you keep working after you recover. If a self-driving car had the failsafe of stopping dead in the middle of the railway tracks until you restore it from backup you're going to have a lot of damaged trains.

No amount of computer database backup will help you when the power goes out. Fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, they happen and power can go out for weeks (in the first world) or longer (in most of the world). With today's connected world, all it takes is for a network switch to go out and hundreds of thousands of commuters get stuck in the downtown during rush hour because the commuter trains have no failsafe while freight trains keep trundling on the same tracks because they do [0].

Making backups is not a failsafe and it's not good enough.

[0] ttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/go-transit-system-problem-1.6985282

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