One 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.
