Internet Librarian

For reasons that surpass understanding, I’ve been ruminating on the National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints lately. (I may be the only person in North America who can honestly say that.)

Either you learned about this and used it back in the day, or you’ve never heard of it. In either event, I bet you haven’t touched it, or even seen it, for years. For the uninitiated, this beast was published in 754 volumes, appearing from 1968 to 1981, and cost $35,000 for the set. It’s got over 11 million author entries for just about every book published prior to 1956, the date at which the existing NUC incorporated the holdings of other libraries besides the Library of Congress.

Mansell (so nicknamed for the publisher) looks like many of those old catalogs-in-a-book, consisting of photostats of catalog cards going on for page after page, volume after volume, shelf after shelf. In essence, it was the OCLC of its day, fulfilling many of the functions that we now rely on WorldCat for, a definitive resource for bibliographic information in very fine detail in a comprehensive, trustworthy fashion.

So what?

Question #1 for most of you is likely: Why was I thinking of this? I often teach it in my classes, and it came up the other day with my first-year students in discussion about searching tools for monographic resources. Of course, I’m under no illusion they’ll use it even if they ever lay eyes on it after graduating.

I talk about it for several reasons. For conceptual reasons, it helps them to understand the origins of the tools we use now, from Amazon to WorldCat to Google Book Search to LibraryThing.

I also hold it up as an example of the creativity and hard work of librarians. Compiling that thing wasn’t easy or pretty, but it was incredibly useful in its day. It’s also a good illustration of a resource that has long since passed its sell-by date; it still has its charms and uses but its best days are obviously long since gone. For a period of roughly, say, 20 years, it was invaluable, but even as it was completed, the seeds of its obsolescence were being sown in work by OCLC and of course the coming internet wave of the ’90s.

Everything ends

Question #2 is likely: Why do I care? What is to be learned here? I tell my students that the object lesson is that everything ends. Mansell was great and then it wasn’t; there are lots of other examples of works that have gone to that great reference desk in the sky. (Reverse phone directories, anyone? Road maps? One-volume encyclopedias?)

As I write this, somebody is likely developing the Next Great Thing that will change the way we work, and supplant something we’ve used and found valuable for a long time. We’ll all ooh and ahh over it, and its predecessor will age and fall away. And someday the Next Thing, too, will end. WorldCat will end, Amazon will end, Google will end. Everything ends.

Even more important than that, though, is that it was worth the effort; they all are. Even though this behemoth had a comparatively brief run, it was useful and we learned from it and moved on. It represents a milestone on our path of innovation and development, which, in the end, is what matters; reacting to and shaping the information environment in which we work and building tools to respond and help out. All tools end, the path remains.

In truth, I also teach Mansell so that my students can say they know it; terribly impressive in a job interview these days . . . but that’s another story.