Every so often pictures featuring someone using a card catalog make the rounds on social media usually on a post referring to card catalogs as old-style Googling, or something to that effect. Or they show a picture of a card catalog and say how much they miss the “good old days.”
Card catalogs were useful and they were the best that we had at the time. They were a testament to the dedication of librarians everywhere striving to bring the world of books and information to the attention of the world at large. But, for those who are too young ever to have used this contraption, let me assure you it was nothing like Google.
If a library owned a book, they created a card set for that book which described who wrote it, what its title was, what its physical characteristics were, what it was about, and also provided the call number where a person could find the book on the shelves in that library. In addition to the main card listed under the author’s last name, there would also be cards created for the title, a few subjects, and sometimes names of other authors or people or groups who had a hand in producing the book. So, a book by one author about a fairly simple subject might have the main card, the title card, and maybe one or two or three subject cards. Each non-fiction book had an average of five or six ways to find it and each work of fiction typically had two (author and title). There were no close matches. Card catalogs were unforgiving: if you didn’t get the spelling of the author’s name correct or get the title exactly right, word for word, you were out of luck. And that’s IF the cards had even been filed correctly in the first place.
The filing rules were complex, often requiring a person doing the filing to undergo many hours of training and revision before they would be allowed to file cards directly into the catalog. Thousands of cards could be received or typed in a library every week for the newly acquired books. These cards would be arranged alphabetically and then given out to people who had to spend some of their time every week filing new cards into the card catalog. Each drawer of this very sophisticated technological wonder had a rod that went through the holes in the bottom of each card to hold the cards in the drawer in place. People who were not yet trusted to file independently would file cards “above the rod” and a reviewer would check their work, put the rod through the cards that had been put in the correct place, and leave the ones that had been filed incorrectly above the rod until they could show the person what they had done wrong. Filing a hundred cards, reviewing them, and correcting the filing mistakes probably took a couple of hours.
If an author wrote under a pseudonym or had a compound surname or a name that English speakers might find confusing, one form of name would be “established” for the author and then cross references from an incorrect to the authorized form of name would be filed throughout the catalog. The same was true for subjects, where one term was authorized and variant forms would be typed onto cross-reference cards. And let’s not forget the upheaval when the authorized form of a subject would be changed because new terminology had come into vogue: hundreds or even thousands of cards would be pulled, the subject terms would be erased with an electric eraser, the new subject terms would be typed on them, and then the cards would be refiled in a different section of the catalog. If there were enough cards filed into a new section, entire drawers would have to be shifted to accommodate the new cards and the drawers would have to be relabeled. Meanwhile, someone wanting to know about that subject would just have to wait for the cards to be retyped and refiled. Ah, the joys of card catalogs! Don’t we miss them?!? NO!
The end result was a card catalog that provided a limited number of ways to locate each book. Drawers would contain cards within a certain alphabetic range. Card catalogs were often divided up into subject catalogs and a separate catalog for authors and titles. If a person was using the drawer you needed to search, you had to stand around and wait for them to finish. The card catalogs for a big library took up hundreds or thousands of square feet that could only be used for only one thing – searching the card catalog.
For the people who compare card catalogs to Google, I can only assume that they don’t have a clue how to use Google. Both Google and online library catalogs draw on information from anywhere in the record about a book and retrieve the closest matches to your search. If you mistype a word, the online search engines forgive your mistake and suggest alternatives. Card catalogs did not do that. If you didn’t know how to spell something or if you only remembered part of the title, you were out of luck.
Card catalogs only covered books or entire journal titles – you could not search for an article in a card catalog. You had to use special paper indexes to learn what was covered in each issue of a journal. They also didn’t include government documents – you had to use special paper indexes to find out about government documents, too. After online journal and government documents indexes were developed, librarians initially did the searching for you because the online time was expensive and the search protocols were complex. As things “progressed” a person was allowed to search through CD-ROM databases on dedicated computer terminals in the library. Ah, yes, the good old days!
For the people who label card catalogs part of the “good old days,” I can safely say that you must not have had to use them much. As a person who spent hours and hours typing and filing cards in these catalogs, I can attest to how limited and limiting they were. Browsing the shelves was often just as effective and faster than trying to find something in the card catalog.
Back when libraries were poised to change over from card to online catalogs, I was in graduate school studying to become a librarian. For one of my classes, I did a survey of attitudes toward online catalogs in the library where I was working – the Bryn Mawr College Libraries. A fellow student did a similar survey where she was working at Swarthmore College. We published the results: Resistance to online catalogs: a comparative study at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges (1986). The thing that struck me the most were the people who were sure that they would lose “serendipity” with an online catalog. The concept of serendipity in a card catalog strikes me as laughable compared to Google or online library catalogs. How many rabbit holes have we all gone down as we discover something serendipitously when we were looking for one specific thing online? Online catalogs and Google are the essence of serendipity. At least, the people we surveyed back in 1984 were operating from the standpoint of facing the unknown. They simply had no way of comprehending how much information they would be able to find, with ever increasing flexibility, with online catalogs and Google. Today’s backward-yearning people who miss card catalogs have no excuse.
Any online catalog is more effective in finding library materials than any card catalog. Period. I guess the people who miss card catalogs also miss rotary phones, phone booths where you had to insert coins to make a call, wind-up clocks, typewriters (especially manual ones), carbon paper, and white-out –and more gems of technology that preceded the digital age. I am not a fan of technology for its own sake but I would not turn the clock back to restore card catalogs as a source of information.
Lifetime musings 