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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. T
by 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.
- rahimnathwani 9y agoHow is a card catalogue better than Amazon or Goodreads, for discoverability?
- amelius 9y agoWell, at least you can be sure that it doesn't put you in an information bubble.
- rahimnathwani 9y agoYou can't be sure that your local library is free of regional or national bias. Sure, you might have a wider bubble by browsing cards randomly, than browsing recommendations on Amazon. But you could equally well browse Amazon somewhat randomly (e.g. by repeatedly clicking the least attractive book from the recommendation section).
- boomboomsubban 9y ago>but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute. You're describing getting a random selection from a section, something computers are excellent at. Or you're talking about browsing things as a list, something else computers excel at. The biggest difference on doing this on a computer is a loss of a sort of grime based review system. Something that could be seen as a benefit or detriment in different circumstances.
- vidarh 9y agoThe 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.