13 ms·

What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

62 points by diodorus 9y ago

norea-armozel 9y ago
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 that I'm getting back into shortwave listening, finding articles on antenna theory is like pulling teeth).
- moftz 9y ago
  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 for, I can quickly change my query and try again. Also, I'm relying on a librarian to know what I'm asking for. Someone can be very helpful in pointing you towards a stack that contains books about my subject but I will still need to do the work of searching through the books to find relevant ones and then still search through them individually to find the bit on info I need. I'm going to encounter a lot of information I don't care about. With a Google Scholar or University library search engine, I'm going to find the exact keywords I'm looking for and maybe some other related terms that I didn't think of. Search engines can be very helpful but you need to know what you are looking for otherwise you are just going to end up doing the same browsing you would have been doing 30+ years ago.
  - philjohn 9y ago
    Not only that, but it's often the way that Librarians are trained to search, but not how the rest of us do.
  - norea-armozel 9y ago
    I don't think my comment implies we ditch digital search indexes. I just think Google as a replacement for properly curated search indexes is the problem here. For general web site searches Google is great but if you're looking for a particular topic it often comes up with sites that aren't even relevant (again my shortwave listening hobby is a great example of this problem). It's pretty hard to work just Google alone when you need a solid base to work from in terms of sites and documents for niche topics. It's why I tend to go back to books for my niche interests. You can't expect Google to handle every possible case because it won't do its primary well.
nkrisc 9y ago
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.
- randomf1fan 9y ago
  While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile) I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for - it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click regardless of purchase)
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    That's a good point. Though there's no reason a computerized system couldn't do that, most of them just don't. Also I don't think electronic catalogs replace human recommendations, just the card system.
    - edflsafoiewq 9y ago
      With a card catalog, the fact that the system does not do that is obvious to the user.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but with little advance conception of what. I bought Godel, Escher, Bach with no awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.
losteverything 9y ago
Anyone remember taking Library Class? Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction? Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)
- E6300 9y ago
  > difference between fiction and non-fiction Wait, was that actually part of a curriculum? Surely if you know what "fiction" and "non-" mean you can understand the difference between the two.
  - losteverything 9y ago
    Yeah. Not like definition but when and where to find a book F by name, located in a separate area; NF by number. Etc. Sample assignment. Diary of Anne Frank. List all areas of the library that have information about the subject (and give name title author(s) etc. And list why you would use that source.
  - labster 9y ago
    Not if you're the US President.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  No, that was stuff we just learned as part of general coursework (at secondary level, integrated into the English curriculum) starting in elementary school, not a specific class.
- magic_beans 9y ago
  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...
  - 9y ago
Theodores 9y ago
Outside of university libraries with real books you have normal libraries. In these libraries the quietest and most devoid of activity area was anywhere near card index things. I am glad their meta data is superceded to some extent. Life moves on rather easily with these media format changes and not much is really lost, except for the likes of this author.
greglindahl 9y ago
The thing we gained when we digitized a bunch of books is the ability to build new kinds of discovery engines, ones that don't just use the information on the card catalog cards: https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book... https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/ https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/
- Millennium 9y ago
  The engines we build nowadays are still mostly based on indexed collections of metadata, just as the old card catalogs were. The innovation was in being able to create new kinds of cards, and then compile catalogs of them automatically from the books (or whatever data sources one cared to use). This is a very useful thing to be able to do, but I'm not sure it can really be called a new kind of discovery engine, just a faster one.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    The entire point of my discovery project was to NOT just use new kinds of card catalog cards, but to instead do discovery on individual sentences. I think that new kinds of card catalog cards could also be pretty novel and interesting, for example I'd love to build a histogram of all of the dates seen in a book and include that in the card catalog card.
    - Millennium 9y ago
      It's a nifty technique, but I'm not sure it refutes my statement. You still have agents crawling the book to build an index of metadata by (in your experiment's case) subjects and years mentioned. You throw away the entries for subjects and years you're not searching for, because they're not needed for your specific problem, but that's an optimization. If you didn't do that, your agents would assemble what amounts to a fine-grained (and correspondingly large) card catalog of sentences, indexed by subject and year, which you could then search.
      - 9y ago
galonk 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pram 9y ago
  Searching for books using analog cards just has a certain warmth and pleasing aesthetic which digital is tragically missing. - library hipster
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  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 card catalog, and typewritten documents before that, imposed limits and therefore selectivity on what degree of information the government could store about a book (and by extension about you), that limit no longer exists so the amount of information stored has exploded while the amount of service provided has remained the same or even diminished, to the general detriment of society. That erstwhile necessity to consult or at least cooperate with librarians also fostered a degree of politeness in social relations.
  - in_the_sticks 9y ago
    Bigger words don't validate whatever point is being made.
    - huntersbellend 9y ago
sharkjacobs 9y ago
> 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.
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  I think the implied point is that somehow telecom business or software design wizards are meddling with what the user sees in digital catalogues, in contrast to the Dewey Decimal, LoC, or other supposedly more neutral topical classification. It's still a tossed-off claim, and I wouldn't even agree anyway under the best good-faith understanding of what he's trying to say.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  Maybe the author never learned that governments and academic institutions still catalog books and offer online search tools for book collections free of advertising or profit motive. The lamentations seem to come from an alternate timeline where Amazon bought all the public libraries and shut them down to push more Kindle sales.
- Millennium 9y ago
  The article isn't very clear on this point, but I think that at this particular juncture, the author isn't so much lamenting "analog versus digital" so much as "public versus private". It's an awkward fit in an article like this.
- gozur88 9y ago
  "Democratic" seems to be one of those words that's lost its meaning. I'm not sure it means much more than "I like this thing" now.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Self-reinforcing productivity differentials.
- inimino 9y ago
Analemma_ 9y ago
Most of these comments seem to read more into the guy's article than there is. Nowhere did he advocate throwing away digital searches and returning to card catalogues. You can be nostalgic for something old-- especially just the aesthetic, which is mostly the case here-- without demanding it be brought back.
pleasecalllater 9y ago
Well, years ago I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards. So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.
pleasecalllater 9y ago
Well, years I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards. So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.
Finnucane 9y ago
One of the first jobs I had out of school was transcribing hand-written catalog records for a then-new digital catalog. The big worry (this was well before Google, Worldcat, etc. existed) in those days was that much of the bibliographic metadata that had accumulated in the card catalog would be lost, because the effort to digitize it all would be too great. The new digital catalog only had a very simplified version. Over time, of course, the systems improved to the point where I don't think even librarians want to go back to the old way.
philipkglass 9y ago
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/searchAdvanced https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced
- mistersquid 9y ago
  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 way to Washington DC. For someone living in rural Wyoming, Ohio, or even Southeast Virginia, the offline card catalog was hardly "more democratic" than a computer in a public library. EDIT: Readability.
  - acdha 9y ago
    > 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 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."
- Aloha 9y ago
  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 something that looked interesting. Yes, for research and for targeted searched of knowledge the electronic search is far superior - but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.
dwe3000 9y ago
While I agree with the sense I get in general that modern, digital catalogs are better for search than the older, analog catalogs, I feel it has gotten worse for myself, and possibly others like me exist, that were not looking for something specific. I enjoyed the discovery possible by browsing through a card catalog - with lots of information without having to walk and scan through the stacks like I was looking for something specific. Improvements are always being made, but my memory of the first digital catalogs are that they were highly specific, so other than finding other books by a specifically searched for author, discovery was severely limited. I hated digital catalogs at first. And for many smaller libraries, I find walking through the stacks easier than trying to discover something via the digital catalog.
- philjohn 9y ago
  I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and one of the things I was in charge of was the discovery interface. One of my biggest yardsticks that I measured the success by was how good the system was at serendipity - allowing people to look for nothing in particular if that's what they wanted, and just discover amazing new things they didn't know were on the shelves.
danso 9y ago
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.
- eesmith 9y ago
  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.
  - danso 9y ago
    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/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/
aqsalose 9y ago
One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...) Library without catalog is, while not totally worthless, much more difficult to use. The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives. See: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existe... I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.
- davchana 9y ago
  Samr can happen to physical cards too. Wear and tear, flood, fire, theft, vandalism. Also, its difficult to create copies of physical as compared to digital. The upside of digital is also that you can and should have multiple backups, same as any other digital data.
  - aqsalose 9y ago
    >For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage However, I'd like to have redundancy. Backups. Library catalogs are quite critical when it comes to using the combined amount of information the humankind has amassed: It's critical infrastructure. We maintain also backups for things like seeds [1]. You would need just an automated machinery to create printout backups once in a while. It does not necessarily have to be exactly the same system as the old catalogs, just enough that something exists and is ready to use after the rare catastrophic failure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      So, you are saying the library should store some solar panels and spare computers somewhere? Creating electricity to run a computer is not really that difficult.
jmull 9y ago
"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." Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work, just like electronics. You have to be able to read the cards, and I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards. And libraries provide local terminals, so service providers, broadband and smartphones aren't required. As far as "democratic", card catalogs aren't bad -- if you can get to the library during operating hours and are physically able to use one, then you are good to go. But electronically searchable indexes are better. E.g., they allow for remote searching, can support accessibility interfaces, etc.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards. Worked OK for 400 years or so. Newspaper archives, too.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  Yeah, this whole article strikes me as one of the "I don't fully understand modern technology so I wistfully recall the predecessor technology that I do understand" variety. There's a lot of these going around these days, and while it's easy to dismiss them when they try to argue on the merits there is a certain value to them from a design perspective. Old-school analog systems were (to the user) tangible, comprehensible, predictable and repeatable in ways that digital systems often fail to match. You push a button and the device does a thing. You push that button 20 years later, still does the same thing. The response is also tactile and immediate, having a specific feel, sound and smell. Much the same reasons us CS nerds glorify mechanical keyboards. I think a lot of apps/user facing products could improve from attempting to emulate analog systems more closely. People want a piece of software that they can use for 20 years without being thrown to the ground when the UX does a triple-360 in the next upgrade because someone thought it was "bad design". In the tech world we seem to gravitate towards this relentless, iterative, constantly changing march to perceived glory when perhaps shifting the balance back the other direction could be helpful.
yuhong 9y ago
This makes me think about lending books during power outages.
- tpeo 9y ago
  Redundancy is actually a good argument for maintaining a library card system along with a digital system. Don't know why the author let that one fly by.
- smkellat 9y ago
  Oh, there are contingency plans for that. They're pretty easy. Writing down barcode numbers and then doing a mass "check out" event on a whole list when power is back covers things. In an extended event, some backup supplies on-hand from Brodart to handle things Jersey-style with temporary card pockets is easily doable.
smkellat 9y ago
I've typed catalog cards. I've maintained a card catalog by hand. My memories aren't nearly as fond as the book review author's. An IBM Selectric is at least still somewhat familiar to me. I haven't been a proper librarian in years. I miss it. We have a reading comprehension problem in the USA as of late. There are not alternative literacies but rather we gave up on the basics. Literacy should be universal yet isn't.
bykovich2 9y ago
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.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  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.
- adrianN 9y ago
  The archive.org guys might be interested in something like that.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
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.
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  Having studied and worked at a Maths department at a University, it isn't only non-working-mathematicians who hate computers. Most of the professors and staff there hated computers, and how it was changing maths.
- Noos 9y ago
  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.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    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.
ams6110 9y ago
Not just the card catalog but the entire concept of library has been lost. Libraries have been transformed from places where people could come to read, research and explore into community homeless shelters that provide online porn access and bathrooms that are basically shooting galleries.
- empthought 9y ago
  This isn't true. Source: I have bothered to set foot in libraries lately.
- bumblebeard 9y ago
  Where are you that your local library is like this? I've been to a few public libraries in my state and none of them have been like this. Most of them aren't very busy but they're always clean and usually have a decent selection of books and media. My local library is especially good; they have an entire floor devoted to children's books and I often see families in there picking out books together.
  - empthought 9y ago
    There are news horror stories about a few major metropolitan libraries in crime-ridden areas, and the grandfather poster generalized them to all 10,000+ other public libraries in the country. That's the only explanation I can think of, anyway.
aaron695 9y ago
> “tagged” by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. 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. Democratic my ass. Card catalogs where as bigoted as the people who wrote them. A small subset of the population. Things on the internet are not tagged, because as a concept it sucks. It has never worked even if Cory and Clay loved them 10 years ago. This is such a strange article since the nostalgic side that's lost is interesting. The extended skill to use them is interesting (A lost art form) and the bias lost in their writing is interesting too. There is a really interesting article possible here.
colordrops 9y ago
I saw a two man play at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood years ago called "Defiled" about a librarian played by Jason Alexander dealing with the loss of card catalogs to the computer. There were long soliloquies about niceness of the physicality of the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal classification and what not. I enjoyed the acting but could not empathize at all with the premise of the play or the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the main character.
titzer 9y ago
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-storm-hit-the-eart-1724650105 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.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  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 ;-)
  - halomru 9y ago
    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.

62 points by diodorus 9y ago

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 that I'm getting back into shortwave listening, finding articles on antenna theory is like pulling teeth).

moftz 9y ago
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 for, I can quickly change my query and try again. Also, I'm relying on a librarian to know what I'm asking for. Someone can be very helpful in pointing you towards a stack that contains books about my subject but I will still need to do the work of searching through the books to find relevant ones and then still search through them individually to find the bit on info I need. I'm going to encounter a lot of information I don't care about. With a Google Scholar or University library search engine, I'm going to find the exact keywords I'm looking for and maybe some other related terms that I didn't think of. Search engines can be very helpful but you need to know what you are looking for otherwise you are just going to end up doing the same browsing you would have been doing 30+ years ago.
- philjohn 9y ago
  Not only that, but it's often the way that Librarians are trained to search, but not how the rest of us do.
- norea-armozel 9y ago
  I don't think my comment implies we ditch digital search indexes. I just think Google as a replacement for properly curated search indexes is the problem here. For general web site searches Google is great but if you're looking for a particular topic it often comes up with sites that aren't even relevant (again my shortwave listening hobby is a great example of this problem). It's pretty hard to work just Google alone when you need a solid base to work from in terms of sites and documents for niche topics. It's why I tend to go back to books for my niche interests. You can't expect Google to handle every possible case because it won't do its primary well.

nkrisc 9y ago

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.

randomf1fan 9y ago
While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile) I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for - it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click regardless of purchase)
- nkrisc 9y ago
  That's a good point. Though there's no reason a computerized system couldn't do that, most of them just don't. Also I don't think electronic catalogs replace human recommendations, just the card system.
  - edflsafoiewq 9y ago
    With a card catalog, the fact that the system does not do that is obvious to the user.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but with little advance conception of what. I bought Godel, Escher, Bach with no awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.

losteverything 9y ago

Anyone remember taking Library Class? Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction? Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)

E6300 9y ago
> difference between fiction and non-fiction Wait, was that actually part of a curriculum? Surely if you know what "fiction" and "non-" mean you can understand the difference between the two.
- losteverything 9y ago
  Yeah. Not like definition but when and where to find a book F by name, located in a separate area; NF by number. Etc. Sample assignment. Diary of Anne Frank. List all areas of the library that have information about the subject (and give name title author(s) etc. And list why you would use that source.
- labster 9y ago
  Not if you're the US President.
dragonwriter 9y ago
No, that was stuff we just learned as part of general coursework (at secondary level, integrated into the English curriculum) starting in elementary school, not a specific class.
magic_beans 9y ago
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...
- 9y ago

Theodores 9y ago

Outside of university libraries with real books you have normal libraries. In these libraries the quietest and most devoid of activity area was anywhere near card index things. I am glad their meta data is superceded to some extent. Life moves on rather easily with these media format changes and not much is really lost, except for the likes of this author.

greglindahl 9y ago

The thing we gained when we digitized a bunch of books is the ability to build new kinds of discovery engines, ones that don't just use the information on the card catalog cards: https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book... https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/ https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/

Millennium 9y ago
The engines we build nowadays are still mostly based on indexed collections of metadata, just as the old card catalogs were. The innovation was in being able to create new kinds of cards, and then compile catalogs of them automatically from the books (or whatever data sources one cared to use). This is a very useful thing to be able to do, but I'm not sure it can really be called a new kind of discovery engine, just a faster one.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  The entire point of my discovery project was to NOT just use new kinds of card catalog cards, but to instead do discovery on individual sentences. I think that new kinds of card catalog cards could also be pretty novel and interesting, for example I'd love to build a histogram of all of the dates seen in a book and include that in the card catalog card.
  - Millennium 9y ago
    It's a nifty technique, but I'm not sure it refutes my statement. You still have agents crawling the book to build an index of metadata by (in your experiment's case) subjects and years mentioned. You throw away the entries for subjects and years you're not searching for, because they're not needed for your specific problem, but that's an optimization. If you didn't do that, your agents would assemble what amounts to a fine-grained (and correspondingly large) card catalog of sentences, indexed by subject and year, which you could then search.
    - 9y ago

galonk 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pram 9y ago
Searching for books using analog cards just has a certain warmth and pleasing aesthetic which digital is tragically missing. - library hipster
anigbrowl 9y ago
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 card catalog, and typewritten documents before that, imposed limits and therefore selectivity on what degree of information the government could store about a book (and by extension about you), that limit no longer exists so the amount of information stored has exploded while the amount of service provided has remained the same or even diminished, to the general detriment of society. That erstwhile necessity to consult or at least cooperate with librarians also fostered a degree of politeness in social relations.
- in_the_sticks 9y ago
  Bigger words don't validate whatever point is being made.
  - huntersbellend 9y ago

sharkjacobs 9y ago

> 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.

lr4444lr 9y ago
I think the implied point is that somehow telecom business or software design wizards are meddling with what the user sees in digital catalogues, in contrast to the Dewey Decimal, LoC, or other supposedly more neutral topical classification. It's still a tossed-off claim, and I wouldn't even agree anyway under the best good-faith understanding of what he's trying to say.
philipkglass 9y ago
Maybe the author never learned that governments and academic institutions still catalog books and offer online search tools for book collections free of advertising or profit motive. The lamentations seem to come from an alternate timeline where Amazon bought all the public libraries and shut them down to push more Kindle sales.
Millennium 9y ago
The article isn't very clear on this point, but I think that at this particular juncture, the author isn't so much lamenting "analog versus digital" so much as "public versus private". It's an awkward fit in an article like this.
gozur88 9y ago
"Democratic" seems to be one of those words that's lost its meaning. I'm not sure it means much more than "I like this thing" now.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Self-reinforcing productivity differentials.
inimino 9y ago

Analemma_ 9y ago

Most of these comments seem to read more into the guy's article than there is. Nowhere did he advocate throwing away digital searches and returning to card catalogues. You can be nostalgic for something old-- especially just the aesthetic, which is mostly the case here-- without demanding it be brought back.

pleasecalllater 9y ago

Well, years ago I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards. So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.

pleasecalllater 9y ago

Well, years I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards. So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.

Finnucane 9y ago

One of the first jobs I had out of school was transcribing hand-written catalog records for a then-new digital catalog. The big worry (this was well before Google, Worldcat, etc. existed) in those days was that much of the bibliographic metadata that had accumulated in the card catalog would be lost, because the effort to digitize it all would be too great. The new digital catalog only had a very simplified version. Over time, of course, the systems improved to the point where I don't think even librarians want to go back to the old way.

philipkglass 9y ago

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/searchAdvanced https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced

mistersquid 9y ago
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 way to Washington DC. For someone living in rural Wyoming, Ohio, or even Southeast Virginia, the offline card catalog was hardly "more democratic" than a computer in a public library. EDIT: Readability.
- acdha 9y ago
  > 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 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."
Aloha 9y ago
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 something that looked interesting. Yes, for research and for targeted searched of knowledge the electronic search is far superior - but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.

dwe3000 9y ago

While I agree with the sense I get in general that modern, digital catalogs are better for search than the older, analog catalogs, I feel it has gotten worse for myself, and possibly others like me exist, that were not looking for something specific. I enjoyed the discovery possible by browsing through a card catalog - with lots of information without having to walk and scan through the stacks like I was looking for something specific. Improvements are always being made, but my memory of the first digital catalogs are that they were highly specific, so other than finding other books by a specifically searched for author, discovery was severely limited. I hated digital catalogs at first. And for many smaller libraries, I find walking through the stacks easier than trying to discover something via the digital catalog.

philjohn 9y ago
I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and one of the things I was in charge of was the discovery interface. One of my biggest yardsticks that I measured the success by was how good the system was at serendipity - allowing people to look for nothing in particular if that's what they wanted, and just discover amazing new things they didn't know were on the shelves.

danso 9y ago

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.

eesmith 9y ago
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.
- danso 9y ago
  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/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/

aqsalose 9y ago

One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...) Library without catalog is, while not totally worthless, much more difficult to use. The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives. See: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-threat/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existe... I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.

davchana 9y ago
Samr can happen to physical cards too. Wear and tear, flood, fire, theft, vandalism. Also, its difficult to create copies of physical as compared to digital. The upside of digital is also that you can and should have multiple backups, same as any other digital data.
- aqsalose 9y ago
  >For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage However, I'd like to have redundancy. Backups. Library catalogs are quite critical when it comes to using the combined amount of information the humankind has amassed: It's critical infrastructure. We maintain also backups for things like seeds [1]. You would need just an automated machinery to create printout backups once in a while. It does not necessarily have to be exactly the same system as the old catalogs, just enough that something exists and is ready to use after the rare catastrophic failure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    So, you are saying the library should store some solar panels and spare computers somewhere? Creating electricity to run a computer is not really that difficult.

jmull 9y ago

"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." Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work, just like electronics. You have to be able to read the cards, and I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards. And libraries provide local terminals, so service providers, broadband and smartphones aren't required. As far as "democratic", card catalogs aren't bad -- if you can get to the library during operating hours and are physically able to use one, then you are good to go. But electronically searchable indexes are better. E.g., they allow for remote searching, can support accessibility interfaces, etc.

reaperducer 9y ago
> I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards. Worked OK for 400 years or so. Newspaper archives, too.
scottLobster 9y ago
Yeah, this whole article strikes me as one of the "I don't fully understand modern technology so I wistfully recall the predecessor technology that I do understand" variety. There's a lot of these going around these days, and while it's easy to dismiss them when they try to argue on the merits there is a certain value to them from a design perspective. Old-school analog systems were (to the user) tangible, comprehensible, predictable and repeatable in ways that digital systems often fail to match. You push a button and the device does a thing. You push that button 20 years later, still does the same thing. The response is also tactile and immediate, having a specific feel, sound and smell. Much the same reasons us CS nerds glorify mechanical keyboards. I think a lot of apps/user facing products could improve from attempting to emulate analog systems more closely. People want a piece of software that they can use for 20 years without being thrown to the ground when the UX does a triple-360 in the next upgrade because someone thought it was "bad design". In the tech world we seem to gravitate towards this relentless, iterative, constantly changing march to perceived glory when perhaps shifting the balance back the other direction could be helpful.

yuhong 9y ago

This makes me think about lending books during power outages.

tpeo 9y ago
Redundancy is actually a good argument for maintaining a library card system along with a digital system. Don't know why the author let that one fly by.
smkellat 9y ago
Oh, there are contingency plans for that. They're pretty easy. Writing down barcode numbers and then doing a mass "check out" event on a whole list when power is back covers things. In an extended event, some backup supplies on-hand from Brodart to handle things Jersey-style with temporary card pockets is easily doable.

smkellat 9y ago

I've typed catalog cards. I've maintained a card catalog by hand. My memories aren't nearly as fond as the book review author's. An IBM Selectric is at least still somewhat familiar to me. I haven't been a proper librarian in years. I miss it. We have a reading comprehension problem in the USA as of late. There are not alternative literacies but rather we gave up on the basics. Literacy should be universal yet isn't.

bykovich2 9y ago

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.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago
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.
adrianN 9y ago
The archive.org guys might be interested in something like that.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

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.

cakedoggie 9y ago
Having studied and worked at a Maths department at a University, it isn't only non-working-mathematicians who hate computers. Most of the professors and staff there hated computers, and how it was changing maths.
Noos 9y ago
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.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  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.

ams6110 9y ago

Not just the card catalog but the entire concept of library has been lost. Libraries have been transformed from places where people could come to read, research and explore into community homeless shelters that provide online porn access and bathrooms that are basically shooting galleries.

empthought 9y ago
This isn't true. Source: I have bothered to set foot in libraries lately.
bumblebeard 9y ago
Where are you that your local library is like this? I've been to a few public libraries in my state and none of them have been like this. Most of them aren't very busy but they're always clean and usually have a decent selection of books and media. My local library is especially good; they have an entire floor devoted to children's books and I often see families in there picking out books together.
- empthought 9y ago
  There are news horror stories about a few major metropolitan libraries in crime-ridden areas, and the grandfather poster generalized them to all 10,000+ other public libraries in the country. That's the only explanation I can think of, anyway.

aaron695 9y ago

> “tagged” by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. 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. Democratic my ass. Card catalogs where as bigoted as the people who wrote them. A small subset of the population. Things on the internet are not tagged, because as a concept it sucks. It has never worked even if Cory and Clay loved them 10 years ago. This is such a strange article since the nostalgic side that's lost is interesting. The extended skill to use them is interesting (A lost art form) and the bias lost in their writing is interesting too. There is a really interesting article possible here.

colordrops 9y ago

I saw a two man play at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood years ago called "Defiled" about a librarian played by Jason Alexander dealing with the loss of card catalogs to the computer. There were long soliloquies about niceness of the physicality of the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal classification and what not. I enjoyed the acting but could not empathize at all with the premise of the play or the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the main character.

titzer 9y ago

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-storm-hit-the-eart-1724650105 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.

mikekchar 9y ago
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 ;-)
- halomru 9y ago
  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.