Month: December 2021

(This post continues thoughts prompted by Prof. Mary Beard; see my previous post for context.

Up close and personal, card catalogs were less loved by those who created and maintained them than by some (or many) of those used them. Nicholson Baker's celebrated articles sought intentionally to denigrate librarians who were well aware of the shortcomings. Less expert users asked for—and often received—a lot of help using card catalogs. They were subject to all kinds of degradation, including a few obnoxious professors or other users who simply ripped out cards rather than write notes about which books to search for in the shelves. By far most card catalog users were respectful, but some weren't and they caused other users and librarians hours of trouble. Somehow Nicholson Baker and others just don't want to remember what working daily with a card catalog was really like --the bad with the good.

Nicholson Baker's celebrated take-down of newspaper digitization was even more precious. Librarians who had to work with old printed newspapers day in and day out often hated them for good reasons. Printed on cheap, acid-based paper, most newspapers quickly deteriorated. As they deteriorated, they gave off motes of dust that included nearly microscopic bits of acidified paper that bore inks with ingredients such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and titanium. A large room full of old newspapers (often located at a basement level) was a mildly toxic environment, toxicity intensified by paper mold. Digitization of content undoubtedly obliterated or obscured some content, but was the only practical alternative to substantial structural, conservation, and labor costs. Baker has apparently preserved many newspapers in his home. I wish him well; I wouldn't set foot in the place, no matter how gracious (or hostile) he might be.

Back to card catalogs: what was lost in the transition to digital catalogs? (—with a pit stop for microfiches.)

In a word, contexts.

A reasonably current academic library collection in a given subject, in the card catalog era, could offer a fair (though not exhaustive) representation of monographic publications. (Journals, manuscripts, archives, and special collections far more variously.) When a user found a run of cards by an author, or particular work, or subject, the size of the run (sometimes helpfully marked by separator cards) could given an impression of amount and range of scholarship. For students, this could be instructive, such as "I've never heard of Plotinus, but here's a large run of cards by or about him." A run of author's works (collected or in summary) was visible in a way not apparent by citations on a screen.

Individual cards could also communicate meanings in an almost tactile manner. Was a card well-thumbed? (—smudged by frequent contact with fingers.) Where cards were filed under an author's last name, did that last name change? (—because of marriage, divorce, immigration, honorary or aristocratic titles, etc.) Were some cards much more thumbed than others? Did that suggest books that were popular, or ignored? Were corrections typed or inked in, death dates added, and what about the see: and see also: references? Did the same work show differences in British and American editions? (—beyond spelling)

Online searching leads easily to the "keyhole" result: I found one thing that I'm looking for online, and remain unaware of a considerable number of resources (some potentially very helpful) which did not come to the surface because of the vagaries or keywords. Discovery services and AI-aided searches (Yewno) haven't yet overcome this. A user confronted with a three-inch set of cards by or about Iris Murdoch is less apt to settle for just one text or resource, and hardly merely the first five cards (equivalent to the first five Google search results).

Librarians, and occasionally users, added handwritten notes, some officially and others much less so. Some were in "library hand" (the official standard for handwritten information), others were less legible in various comments, sometimes underlines: "2nd ed." --! or: "Vol. 3 never published." Occasionally: "Ask librarian." Readers might introduce editorial comments, which while discouraged were impossible to prevent. I remember seeing the author card for William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale marked with red pencil: "Bullshit." At Firestone Library, a few cards author cards for F. Scott Fitzgerald were noted, "University Cottage Club." At Speer Library (Princeton Theological Seminary, home of many students of John Calvin), the wonderful cross-reference card "See, Holy. See: Holy See." was marked in early 20th-century pen, "That seeing they may see, and not perceive." (—a reference to Mark 4:12 in the Authorized Version.)

These notes could have a down side: hostile remarks about racism, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr., or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Joseph McCarthy. In the U.K., I suspect that Margaret Thatcher might have received similar treatment had not the rise of digital catalogs prevented it.

In a card catalog, a user could more readily get a sense of the run of centuries-old scholarship on some subjects: the successive translations of Augustine's Confessions, or Dante, or Petrarch, for example. One might also glean insights into local scholarship: famous scholars who served their universities on committees, or as Deans, Rectors, or Wardens, or who even participated in local politics. This was particularly true in the mental interaction of the catalog with the shelves (stacks): physical co-locations that were enhanced or obscured by cataloging.

Card catalogs also encouraged library serendipity: the user seeking one thing but finding another, as well as surprises for the uninitiated: the undergraduate who discovered that the editor and author G. E. M. Anscombe was female, or that Jack Lewis was also C.S. Lewis. As indirect teaching devices, card catalogs ensured a slower pace of searches and research that had the effect of leavening the learning processes, as well as sometimes frustrating the learner. As a librarian, I could not count the number of times I was interrupted (while filing cards) by users who needed help, and those encounters frequently led to various kinds of both library and subject instruction. In my experience, users frustrated by online searches (searching has always been frustrating!) are far less apt to seek help, but just live with partial or unhelpful results.

As social centers for both librarians and users, card catalogs encouraged interaction in the web of library support that was so crucial for young scholars. Invariably three users and a librarian would converge on one drawer, or set of drawers, at a time, leading not only to patient negotiation and cooperation, but acquaintance. Searching an online catalog is a much more individual, even lonely, experience.

I very much wish that 21st century academic libraries could develop better and clearer ways for young scholars to interact with each other and their mentors. I agree with Prof. Beard: the web of library interaction has suffered, because of technology, economies, and the drift of digital culture suggested by the new verb "to friend." Alas, there is no going back, but social serendipity might strike again. The readiness is all.

Prof. Mary Beard has again spurred me to thoughts and second thoughts about librarianship (see September 3) -- this time about card catalog. (NB She spells the word in the traditional British manner; I follow the American custom of dropping the final -ue.)

In her always stimulating blog A Don's Life (paywall) she wrote a few days ago about the agonies of migrating her e-mail from a previous system (Hermes, a successor to Eudora) that worked pretty well to Microsoft Outlook. As a veteran Outlook user (both the installed app and the web version), I sympathize. "It repeatedly deletes emails in mid-composition" (—so I think she is using Outlook via Office365, but I'm not sure). Heaven knows that anything Microsoft is bound to cause trouble, probably more than it's worth. "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" is undoubtedly true of campus IT departments, but its users are bound to be less happy. The law of unintended consequences holds true for Microsoft as anything else: As the system grows more complex, it grows unwieldy. (I can wax nostalgic about Sendmail that used to be part of freeBSD, but I desist.)

The same frustrations continue when Prof. Beard encounters her bank's allegedly upgraded online system: bank online systems are notoriously opaque and seem to be designed to frustrate the customer. Providing "better customer service" leads back to the law of unintended consequences.

Which brings our good don to library "catalogues."

It is all uncannily reminiscent of the demise of library card catalogues twenty-five or so years ago. For those of us fighting to preserve the old-fashioned card catalogue, or even the older-fashioned guard book, it was a losing battle. There are certainly advantages to an online catalogue (you can search it from anywhere, for a start, and you can introduce different search terms, and so on; I am not blind to these). But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue. When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method (just like there are losses in the voice-recognition banking system)?

Many of us have been through various iterations of this. Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art? A bit of humility on the part of the cyber-planners would not go amiss. I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites, and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues. Last laugh …

Time to Upgrade? Card Catalogues to Online Banking

Much of this hits home. I have been a librarian throughout the period of digitization (1980s), first of library catalogs, then of journals and books themselves. (The latter much less far along than the former, thankfully.). There was too much ridiculous boosterism over the decades, especially in the 1980s, and a good bit of techno-cultural imperialism as well. Too many firms had too much to sell, and over-sell. To every era its excesses. Even a smidgen of humility was lacking.

"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses in the online method?" I knew librarians who were haunted by the losses, and I can remember numerous personal conversations. Those confutations never reached print because of the prevailing orthodoxies both within and outside the profession.

I remember feverish rebuttals and whispered partial agreements with Nicholson Baker's celebrated and idiosyncratic "Discards" essay in The New Yorker (paywall) in 1994, expanded in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, 2001. Baker's counter-assault borders on the airing of personal grudges, and in twenty-year retrospect strikes one as alternately prescient, precious, and privileged to the point whining. (I do enjoy linking to the OCLC record for Baker's book, a bit of bibliographic snark.) The contretemps up to 1998 is nicely assessed by Cox, Greenberg, and Porter in "Access Denied: The Discarding of Library History" (JSTOR); see also a bibliography of responses compiled by the Association of Research Libraries. (FWIW the Wikipedia article isn't bad.) Baker's polarizing polemic over-determined what might have been more useful discussions.

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2017) is an enjoyable survey of previous practices and artifacts,, and Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929 (MIT Press, 2011) provides global context around pivotal points in Europe and America.

Several personal observations from that period and since:

"When did any high-tech librarian ever allow that there might be some losses . . ." introduces a straw person. Such a figure is all to easy to ridicule when a considerable majority of librarians are trying to cope with the vagaries of any kind of bibliographic technology (including cards) while responding as humans to humans and their needs. I've met almost stereotypical "high-tech" librarians in years past, but fewer rabidly enthusiastic as time goes on. The bloom has been off that rose for some time. Most librarians are by now too experienced with the vagaries of information technology to be fooled easily.

So-called "known item" searches are undeniably frustrating with almost all of the library service platforms. Librarians are the first to know those frustrations, since we spend a good deal of time searching for known items (to make sure we haven't already purchased them, for one thing). "But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" —unless, that is, you're not sure of the spelling of the author's name, or its "authorized" form, or you get the first word of a title wrong. If you're looking in a card catalog that isn't too large, the problem isn't too large. If you have a very large card catalog (like I knew at Firestone Library, Princeton University), the desired bit of information might be drawers away. Not to mention the vagaries of conference proceedings, technical reports, and series titles.

I used to file catalog cards, knew the ALA filing rules backwards and forwards, including a few local exceptions. The placement of the "main card" (usually the "author" card) was the most important, because that had the full list of "tracings," or the other cards in the set: as necessary the title card, uniform title card (especially for translations), series title card, series corporate author card; the subject-heading cards usually went into an adjacent "subject catalog" because the authorized Library of Congress subject headings could become so complex. Any of those cards could be misfiled; student files would typically leave their file cards "above the rod" so that their work could be reviewed, and when they became expert enough they could be allow to "drop the cards" or "pull the rod." I became expert enough that at Butler Library, Columbia I was entrusted to file "New York" author and title cards, distinguishing carefully between New York State, County, City, University, New-York Historical Society (that hyphen was important), among others.

"But if you know the author and title, there is no quicker way to find a book than a card catalogue" --if the card has been correctly filed! My digression above is simply to point out some of the numerous points that could go wrong.

"Who remembers when we were told that microfiche library catalogues (remember them?) were state of the art?" Thankfully the era of microfiche catalogs is long gone. This early 20th-century technology turns out to have been a transitional format although that was not realized at the time. Microfiche catalogs were undoubtedly worse than card catalogs --the only benefit they produced was for a library, that it need sort cards only once. For users, microfiche catalogs provided all the headaches of cards and microforms in one demonic package. Microfiche catalogs were a supposed economy that undoubtedly was never achieved due to the costs of the technology and distribution—the very definition of a false economy.

It is incredible to think that library computer automation was once sold as "money-saving." In salary terms, probably this was true, because a significant number of low-level employees could be re-assigned to other tasks, or cut. Remaining professional-level employees ultimately cost more (they became even more skilled), as well as the new employees (technical support) that the new systems demanded. Online catalogs have produced results that card catalogs could not produce, but they have not saved money. That was always a false argument, especially in the long run as systems needed to be updated, migrated, and secured.

"I almost hope that I am around when the energy crisis really bites, and people are scurrying around to resurrect their card catalogues." Well, the good professor will be left in a damp, dark, and completely unventilated library (except for openable windows, not always a building feature). No card catalogs will be resurrected: academic libraries are now just too large. In the event of society-wide, massive and distributed power failure, a great deal of journal and monograph content will simply vanish, at least for almost all users. That is truly worrisome. The remaining print collections will be too large to produce another card catalog at a time when society and universities will doubtless have quite a list of far more pressing problems. There really is no going back. The apocalypse may feature books, but not catalogs.

I was reminded of the irrevocable character of historical change a few months ago when I visited the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut. Once New London was a major shipping and trans-shipment point with excellent natural mooring (with a draft too shallow for later times). Now the small city is dominated by a college, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and Electric Boat and related industries (EB across the river in Groton; it makes submarines). Lyman Allyn was a wealthy merchant and his daughter left the manor house, art collection, and substantial bequest. The Museum library now means essentially a large room for presentations (and yoga sessions), but the actual books of the library are still located on the inset shelves, including the card catalog. A real card catalog with a substantial portion of the tangible collection it represents, still intact and on site! It was a beautiful experience to work through a drawer of cards again, but with a catch: I doubt that anything has been added to this library since the 1980s. I am certain that over the intervening years some books have been lost. Nevertheless—there it was, a real card catalog that turned a room with with a lot of books into an actual library. The only thing missing, sadly, was a living librarian. Should anyone begin to work with the collection again, there will be no recourse but to verify its contents with reference to online databases (even informally, such as LibraryThing).

A second blog entry asks, "What was lost when catalogs were transitioned from cards to computers?"