Dead Trees We Have Known
by Will Manley
Mon, 06/20/2011 - 08:10
For some, our bark was better than our bytes
PrintOne of my biggest mistakes as a library administrator was getting rid of the card catalog. No, I’m not talking about replacing it with a digital version. Everyone did that back in the ’80s. That was a no-brainer. What I mean is that after we installed the OPAC, I sent the physical card catalog into the oblivion of Waste Management instead of sending representative parts of it to the local history museum. What landfill it resides in now only future archeologists will know.
It strikes me that for a whole generation of digital natives, the term “card catalog” is as obscure as the term “8-track tape.” For those of us who grew up learning to master all the idiosyncrasies of the card catalog in order to do our dreaded high school and college term papers, that time period seems a bit like ancient history.
Ancient or modern, it’s instructive to look back 25 years and reflect. First off, we librarians all had to take cataloging in library school because, at the heart of librarianship was bibliographic control, and at the heart of bibliographic control was the card catalog. Whether you wanted to be in technical services, public services, or administration, the first step to becoming a librarian was mastering our professional Book of Deuteronomy—The Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition. Once that was accomplished, you were free to follow your heart and explore the idiosyncrasies of Granger’s, Poole’s, and the redoubtable inventor of modern management science, Peter Drucker. But AACR2 was foundational. Now, of course, the metadata anarchists are in the driver’s seat and bibliographic control is a fading mirage in the rearview window.
Quite possibly, the fact that AACR2 was forced upon us at the very beginning of my generation’s professional initiation rites explains why there weren’t many warm and fuzzy eulogies at the card catalog’s funeral. It was as if a complicated, difficult, and ill-tempered uncle had finally died. Yes, he meant well…but what a pain.
It’s also probably why I jettisoned my library’s old card catalog without a thought of preserving its eccentricities for the edification of emerging generations of digital natives. Not only was it an “out of sight, out of mind” impulse, but assigning it to some smelly landfill prevented any possibility of a horror movie–like scenario…say, The Midnight Return of the Card Catalog.
True, there were those who mourned the card catalog’s passing and would have done anything to save it. Their mantra was, “Can’t we have a card catalog and a computer catalog?” Some of these Luddites were catalogers, but most were sentimentalists (history professors were a prime group) who missed the card catalog’s “tactile” pleasures. They loved tracking the historicity of the various cards, which had evolved from handwritten (something called the library “hand” was actually a course taught in fin de siècle library schools) to manually typed to electrically typed to commercially printed to computer generated.
Then there was the smudge factor. You could tell which were the really popular subject areas by the smudges on a grouping of cards. In public libraries, the most smudged cards were under the Subject Heading “Automobiles—Maintainence and Repair.” Duh.
Finally, tears were shed over losing a warm and handsome piece of oaken furniture that gave the library a unique touch of character. Never mind that the final generation of card catalogs was made from a really repulsive faux-wood plastic.
Why do I bring this up? Well, more and more I hear people talk about the tactile pleasures of the printed book. The more e-books that are sold, the more you hear the term “tactile.”
My advice: Enjoy those tactile pleasures while you can. It won’t be long now.
WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.
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Comments
New life for old card catalogs
Some of us hung on to and “repurposed’ random card catalog units.
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memories
Wow, Will…you brought back a lot of memories…and you hit the nail on the head about what we (maybe still) miss. I was one of the ones who wanted both , but I have come to truly appreciate the automated system. Nonetheless, maybe I’m just in denial, but I don’t agree that books are on the way out. It isn’t just librarians who like books. I often hear from patrons who say how much they prefer the printed book. Still yet, consider the article in the April 20, 2011 Publishers Weekly that stated, “Despite the higher interest in digital readers, 75% of the college students in the March 2011 survey said that, if the choice was entirely theirs, they would select a print textbook. This is similar to the finding of the October 2010 e-reader survey, as well as one done in the fall of 2008.”
Enjoy the ride
“Hey Dad, can I have the keys now?” — Metadata Anarchist.
E-books may someday rule
I’m one of those who do NOT miss filing in the card catalog. For 12 years I worked for a vendor which created printed, microform, CD, and ultimately, online catalogs for public, academic, and school libraries, and library consortiums. Authority control was a big issue and we had numerous programs we could run, but which still required manual intervention to correct and add appropriate data to headings.
As for e-books…I’m a Luddite who still prefers hardcopy. But many of my patrons of all ages own e-book readers and love them. I once borrowed a Kindle from a bookclub member who must be in her 70s because I couldn’t get the hardback in time for our meeting and she told me that she and her husband each had their own. They especially love them for travel.
I think my 23-year old daughter may be the wave of the future. She just bought a Nook, because she wants the color, and is replacing her favorite hardbacks with the digital edition so she always has them with her. She doesn’t care about the format, she cares about portability and ease of use. It may be a long time before the printed book is completely gone, but I think it will happen.
If you can find an old
If you can find an old catalog cabinet, it could make a large jewerly box as a momento.
Card Catalog
I have our library’s old card catalog in a work room, along with some old, old books. Books too old to catalog, too “neat” to put in the sale room for a dollar, not pristine enough to be worth anything. My plan is to someday have a rare book room or area of the library complete with cards cataloging these books and stored in the old card catalog. A kind of hands-on museum where folks can see how we used to catalog and look up items. I’m waiting for that perfect volunteer, intern or community service worker who will want to help me do this!
At the Texas State Library
At the Texas State Library and Archives, we used the old card catalog furniture to store audiotapes of Texas House and Senate committee and floor discussions and debates. The cassettes in their cases fit perfectly into the drawers.
Here at the Villa Park Public Library, the last card catalog unit got relegated to the maintenance room, where it is used to store containers of nails, hooks, and other miscellany needed by the janitors.
I like the idea of storing wine, though! Or what a great addition to a cocktail bar, if you can find bottles of the right size.
Card Catalog
Can’t believe you sent the units to waste management…do you know how much wine you can store well in those units?
Card Catalog
Oh, yes I remember the good old days and trying to remember the AACR2 rules. In our cataloging class, we had to hand print catalog cards as part of our course work. Oh how I hopefully put the colons in what I thought were the right place and the red marks the teacher put on them when I inevitably didn’t get it quite right!
Working in a private library, we were still using the old card catalog up to two years ago. Then we were taken over by the County library, the card catalog was taken away and we became computerized. I for one don’t miss having to file those cards every day! But I too think we lost something with the transition, be it tactile pleasure or a loss of connectivity. As for print books, how many years have “they” predicted the end of the book? I for one hope they will be around for a long time to come and won’t ever completely go away. I can’t (and don’t want to) imagine a day when I can’t pick up a book to read. But given the rush to computerize and digitize everything, you may be right. Things just change too fast (now I sound like an old foggy but am I the only one who feels they are being passed by on the digital highway?).
disagree
Will, I have to respectfully disagree. e-books and OPACs are not equatable. Once an OPAC is available in a library, it makes no sense to continue the use of a card catalog. Keeping the two in sync would be a nightmare and why deal with the idiosyncrasies of both a card catalog and an OPAC? Better to focus on the OPAC and move on.
That said, there are still many libraries out there, and some in my immediate area, still using card catalogs because they cannot afford an OPAC or a consortium membership.
However, e-books are a different animal. They may outsell paperback’s on Amazon, but e-books still primarily serve the population on the “winning” side of the digital divide: those with the means to purchase a computer, e-readers, and reliable broadband Internet and the knowledge - or willingness to learn - to use them.
My library offers e-books through OverDrive, and we became the first library in the region to loan e-readers (partly in an effort to cancel out digital divide issues). Thus far, usage still falls along the digital divide lines, as library users who are not comfortable with computers or gadgets (a large percent from all ages, believe it or not) want their books in dead-tree format.
I firmly belief that the upcoming death of the book by e-book has been greatly exaggerated. It is a technophile’s folly to expect all levels of society to fall in line with the gadget-lovers when there is a perfectly good (and cheap) solution in hand, minus the learning curve.