
What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog - diodorus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-libraries-lost-when-they-threw-out-the-card-catalog/2017/07/07/5432821c-632f-11e7-a4f7-af34fc1d9d39_story.html
======
philipkglass
I remember card catalogs. Modern electronic search is far superior. If
searching the card catalog at the public library is "truly democratic," so is
searching an electronic index at the public library. You can even perform
full-text searches for words that the card-preparer might not have noted -- a
huge advantage when researching niche topics that don't get their own books.

[https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced](https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced)

[https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced](https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced)

[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced)

~~~
Aloha
The Card Catalog in my opinion had one benefit - Discoverability.

In the libraries I grew up using, often the books had library bindings with no
dust jacket. There was very little discoverability when you wanted to find
something to read.. to explore. The card catalog filled that, and was all in
one place, so I could sit there and thumb thru the cards and maybe find a
couple-three books to go thumb thru to find something that looked interesting.

Yes, for research and for targeted searched of knowledge the electronic search
is far superior - but for the discovery of things you don't know anything
about yet, its a poor substitute.

~~~
boomboomsubban
>but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor
substitute.

You're describing getting a random selection from a section, something
computers are excellent at. Or you're talking about browsing things as a list,
something else computers excel at.

The biggest difference on doing this on a computer is a loss of a sort of
grime based review system. Something that could be seen as a benefit or
detriment in different circumstances.

~~~
vidarh
The big difference is _potentially_ access to the "raw data" without being
limited to the view someone has decided to grant access to. E.g many library
search systems I've used would have been _able_ to offer this kind of view of
the data, but _didn 't_. Then again others have offered far better views.

But I'd rather replace those bad systems with better ones than go back to a
card catalog.

------
bykovich2
When I was in college, my school was disposing of their card catalog by
providing the cards as scratch paper for catalog numbers -- next to the
computer terminals that had replaced them. I spirited dozens, maybe hundreds,
of them out. I was particularly happy to have preserved some of the cards for
the Asian languages collection, which had -- due, I presume, to the
limitations of typewriters -- been written by hand.

I have them boxed up somewhere. They're not very interesting, all said, but I
could certainly digitize them. I can't decide if that would be an insult or an
enshrinement.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I think that would be entirely appropriate. A major goal of modern library
science is to digitize rare and crumbling old books for the benefit of all
patrons, present and future. I'm glad we switched to digital catalogs, but
using the new methods to enshrine their own foundational technology seems
deeply poetic.

------
nkrisc
Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while.
When it's new, it's scary and bad. I look forward to being 90 and reading
about people wistfully remembering the simpler and more cultured bygone days
of smartphones and Facebook.

~~~
randomf1fan
While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about
anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the
catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based
on your profile)

I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good
bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or
what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for -
it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that
bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click
regardless of purchase)

~~~
anigbrowl
I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you
know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But
many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from
aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but
with little advance conception of what. I bought _Godel, Escher, Bach_ with no
awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several
window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi
section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably
read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.

~~~
ktRolster
A huge advantage of libraries in general is that they are a curated collection
of books on every topic. Typically the quality you get on any topic will be
higher than the average new book.

Sometimes you can just walk through the library looking for something to read.

------
titzer
Well, karma be damned.

Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a
dark age.

Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very
vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859
([http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-
stor...](http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-storm-hit-
the-eart-1724650105)), which could knock out power for months or years at a
time.

We'd need a way to maintain society without organized computer networks, at
least in those areas. Given how interdependent we are, one really wonders if
society itself would not collapse.

I know, it's crazy. But imagine you woke up to a world without any computers
or computer networks. Maybe that world is 1 year after such an event, or 20.
How would you reboot society, or the very least, find and learn what you
needed to learn? The answer would be a _library_.

Books will survive. At least, until we digitize and upload all of them, then
throw them away.

Apparently we have already thrown away the paper copy of the index. This is
extremely dangerous.

~~~
mikekchar
To be honest, I'm more worried about the lack of education we have these days.
We seem to take for granted that a certain level of knowledge is unnecessary
these days -- because we can just let the factories deal with it. How many
people know how to make preserves? How many know how to make beer? How many
know how to grow vegetables? How many know how to fillet a fish? It's just
basic information that used to be common knowledge in every household -- it's
already lost to the majority now. Of course we can relearn it from books, but
I often think that together with this explosion of access to knowledge, we're
already in a bit of a dark age. I suppose the cause is that most are
uninterested. Even me, if I'm honest ;-)

~~~
halomru
In any scenario where society or technology breaks down enough for these
skills to be useful, the majority of the population still won't miss them.
Without industrialised fishing and farming (which relies on oil and huge
production chains) we don't have nearly enough fish for people to filet or
grain for people to make bread (let alone beer). And statically speaking you
will be starved before your vegetables are grown.

------
PhasmaFelis
First comment on the article is extremely relevant:

> _It 's almost always non-working-librarians who evince such passionate
> nostalgia for antiquated technology such as card catalogs, just as I'm sure
> it's usually non-working-engineers and non-working-mathematicians who
> passionately yearn for the days of slide rules and good old pencil and
> paper, rather than these dang new-fangled computers. (Oh, and yes, just for
> the record, I do appreciate card catalogs as beautiful and evocative
> historical artifacts, but nothing more than that. As a working librarian, I
> would _absolutely _not want to have to go back to working exclusively with
> them. Take my word for it,_ no one _in my profession would.)_

That matches my experience. I've worked with librarians, and they are
invariably excited about the power of computers and the internet. That's
because their driving passion is free and easy information access for all, not
nostalgia for the texture of the page and the smell of old paper.

~~~
Noos
I don't know why they are, they are increasingly becoming the equivalent to a
free net cafe. It's a ridiculously underpaid profession, partly because
computers cost so much to maintain and service for them.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
There are still too many people who don't have ready internet access. Free
internet, and a librarian to help use it, can be vital to a homeless person
trying to find work, for example.

------
sharkjacobs
> A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that
> ... was truly democratic.

I don't think I get how a digital library catalogue is less democratic than an
analogue one? Is this just a poorly thought out and tossed off claim or is
there something I'm missing.

~~~
philipkglass
Maybe the author never learned that governments and academic institutions
still catalog books and offer online search tools for book collections free of
advertising or profit motive. The lamentations seem to come from an alternate
timeline where Amazon bought all the public libraries and shut them down to
push more Kindle sales.

------
losteverything
Anyone remember taking Library Class?

Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film
strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction?

Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)

~~~
E6300
> difference between fiction and non-fiction

Wait, was that actually part of a curriculum? Surely if you know what
"fiction" and "non-" mean you can understand the difference between the two.

~~~
losteverything
Yeah. Not like definition but when and where to find a book

F by name, located in a separate area; NF by number. Etc.

Sample assignment. Diary of Anne Frank. List all areas of the library that
have information about the subject (and give name title author(s) etc. And
list why you would use that source.

------
pleasecalllater
Well, years ago I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format
used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries
I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even
had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards.

So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.

------
smkellat
I've typed catalog cards. I've maintained a card catalog by hand. My memories
aren't nearly as fond as the book review author's. An IBM Selectric is at
least still somewhat familiar to me.

I haven't been a proper librarian in years. I miss it. We have a reading
comprehension problem in the USA as of late. There are not alternative
literacies but rather we gave up on the basics. Literacy should be universal
yet isn't.

------
greglindahl
The thing we _gained_ when we digitized a bunch of books is the ability to
build new kinds of discovery engines, ones that don't just use the information
on the card catalog cards:

[https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-
book...](https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-
the-21st-century/)

[https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/](https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/)

~~~
Millennium
The engines we build nowadays are still mostly based on indexed collections of
metadata, just as the old card catalogs were. The innovation was in being able
to create new kinds of cards, and then compile catalogs of them automatically
from the books (or whatever data sources one cared to use). This is a very
useful thing to be able to do, but I'm not sure it can really be called a new
kind of discovery engine, just a faster one.

~~~
greglindahl
The entire point of my discovery project was to NOT just use new kinds of card
catalog cards, but to instead do discovery on individual sentences.

I think that new kinds of card catalog cards could also be pretty novel and
interesting, for example I'd love to build a histogram of all of the dates
seen in a book and include that in the card catalog card.

~~~
Millennium
It's a nifty technique, but I'm not sure it refutes my statement. You still
have agents crawling the book to build an index of metadata by (in your
experiment's case) subjects and years mentioned. You throw away the entries
for subjects and years you're not searching for, because they're not needed
for your specific problem, but that's an optimization. If you didn't do that,
your agents would assemble what amounts to a fine-grained (and correspondingly
large) card catalog of sentences, indexed by subject and year, which you could
then search.

~~~
philjohn
Have a look at the latest breed of discovery interfaces that do full text
search on their corpus, EDS Discovery, Ex Libris Primo, Serial Solutions
Summon. For academic work they are invaluable, letting students and
researchers find snippets of related research.

------
Analemma_
Most of these comments seem to read more into the guy's article than there is.
Nowhere did he advocate throwing away digital searches and returning to card
catalogues. You can be nostalgic for something old-- especially just the
aesthetic, which is mostly the case here-- without demanding it be brought
back.

------
dwe3000
While I agree with the sense I get in general that modern, digital catalogs
are better for search than the older, analog catalogs, I feel it has gotten
worse for myself, and possibly others like me exist, that were not looking for
something specific. I enjoyed the discovery possible by browsing through a
card catalog - with lots of information without having to walk and scan
through the stacks like I was looking for something specific.

Improvements are always being made, but my memory of the first digital
catalogs are that they were highly specific, so other than finding other books
by a specifically searched for author, discovery was severely limited. I hated
digital catalogs at first. And for many smaller libraries, I find walking
through the stacks easier than trying to discover something via the digital
catalog.

~~~
philjohn
I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and one of the things I was in charge of was
the discovery interface. One of my biggest yardsticks that I measured the
success by was how good the system was at serendipity - allowing people to
look for nothing in particular if that's what they wanted, and just discover
amazing new things they didn't know were on the shelves.

------
aaron695
> “tagged” by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the
> subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card
> catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no
> electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was
> truly democratic.

Democratic my ass. Card catalogs where as bigoted as the people who wrote
them. A small subset of the population.

Things on the internet are not tagged, because as a concept it sucks. It has
never worked even if Cory and Clay loved them 10 years ago.

This is such a strange article since the nostalgic side that's lost is
interesting. The extended skill to use them is interesting (A lost art form)
and the bias lost in their writing is interesting too. There is a really
interesting article possible here.

------
norea-armozel
I think the problem I have with modern election search is that often presented
with what I don't want and I have to craft my query to get a decent list of
sources. Mind you, this was way back in 2009 at Wichita State but the
experience always seem to come up even when I use Google Scholar or equivalent
modern search indices. They always seem to be off in terms of accuracy and
relevance on the searches (especially now that I'm getting back into shortwave
listening, finding articles on antenna theory is like pulling teeth).

~~~
moftz
But going back to a card catalog system, you can really only search in ways
that someone else has created. You can't search by words within an article,
you can't search using regular expressions (or at least some boolean
operators), and you can only find things as fast as you can thumb through a
stack of cards. At least with a search engine, if I type in a query that isn't
going to find me what I'm actually looking for, I can quickly change my query
and try again. Also, I'm relying on a librarian to know what I'm asking for.
Someone can be very helpful in pointing you towards a stack that contains
books about my subject but I will still need to do the work of searching
through the books to find relevant ones and then still search through them
individually to find the bit on info I need. I'm going to encounter a lot of
information I don't care about. With a Google Scholar or University library
search engine, I'm going to find the exact keywords I'm looking for and maybe
some other related terms that I didn't think of. Search engines can be very
helpful but you need to know what you are looking for otherwise you are just
going to end up doing the same browsing you would have been doing 30+ years
ago.

~~~
norea-armozel
I don't think my comment implies we ditch digital search indexes. I just think
Google as a replacement for properly curated search indexes is the problem
here. For general web site searches Google is great but if you're looking for
a particular topic it often comes up with sites that aren't even relevant
(again my shortwave listening hobby is a great example of this problem). It's
pretty hard to work just Google alone when you need a solid base to work from
in terms of sites and documents for niche topics. It's why I tend to go back
to books for my niche interests. You can't expect Google to handle every
possible case because it won't do its primary well.

------
colordrops
I saw a two man play at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood years ago called
"Defiled" about a librarian played by Jason Alexander dealing with the loss of
card catalogs to the computer. There were long soliloquies about niceness of
the physicality of the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal classification and
what not. I enjoyed the acting but could not empathize at all with the premise
of the play or the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the main character.

------
danso
I think I'll check this book out. Taxonomy is still a hard problem in terms of
digital information theory, so I'm interested in how it was managed in a
system in which storage was scalability had much harder physical limits.

~~~
eesmith
If that interests you, read more about S.R. Ranganathan, who introduced
faceted classification and Otlet's work with Mundaneum and the Universal
Decimal Classification. 100 years ago it was possible to search ~10 million
records.

~~~
danso
Thanks for the tip! Looking at the "Card Catalog" book on Amazon [0], I see it
seems to be more of a photo book more suited for coffee table reading.

[0]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/)

------
Finnucane
One of the first jobs I had out of school was transcribing hand-written
catalog records for a then-new digital catalog. The big worry (this was well
before Google, Worldcat, etc. existed) in those days was that much of the
bibliographic metadata that had accumulated in the card catalog would be lost,
because the effort to digitize it all would be too great. The new digital
catalog only had a very simplified version. Over time, of course, the systems
improved to the point where I don't think even librarians want to go back to
the old way.

------
yuhong
This makes me think about lending books during power outages.

~~~
smkellat
Oh, there are contingency plans for that. They're pretty easy. Writing down
barcode numbers and then doing a mass "check out" event on a whole list when
power is back covers things.

In an extended event, some backup supplies on-hand from Brodart to handle
things Jersey-style with temporary card pockets is easily doable.

------
Theodores
Outside of university libraries with real books you have normal libraries. In
these libraries the quietest and most devoid of activity area was anywhere
near card index things. I am glad their meta data is superceded to some
extent. Life moves on rather easily with these media format changes and not
much is really lost, except for the likes of this author.

------
aqsalose
One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a
very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all
librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...)

Library without catalog is, while not _totally_ worthless, _much_ more
difficult to use.

The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant
to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a
giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives.

See: [https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-
existe...](https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existential-
threat/)

I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain
physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.

~~~
scottLobster
If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated
to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about.

If a hacker manages to destroy the database, well it's a good thing backups
are cheap these days and it doesn't take a trained IT person to implement
them. Even Crashplan or Carbonite, or just periodically copying files to an
external drive and then disconnecting it would probably do the job. If
libraries have the money for hundreds of pounds of paper cards and the
cabinets to store them in, plus labor to maintain all of that, they surely
have the money for functional-if-basic backup infrastructure.

I'm all for securing critical infrastructure with analog systems/subsystems,
but the only argument I could see for doing so with libraries is if said
library is in the developing world where electricity is intermittent.

~~~
aqsalose
>If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated
to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about.

Well, yes. But a library rendered unusable is also a major problem, in the
long run. And especially if it's not just the local library, but all of them
in the country?

I would probably need to read the book in question to be able to do Fermi
estimates on what kind of amounts of paper and space the old system would
need. But if one already has the "this is a backup system for very rare, very
worst-case events, not for active use" viewpoint, one is free to do changes
and optimizations. For example, miniaturized analogue backup from which the
full-blown card system can be reproduced if the need arises.

~~~
tpeo
What do you mean by "in the long run"? Because a library being rendered
unusable for a definite length of time wouldn't be a problem in the long run
unless we're talking about a system with path dependence. And even if there is
some path dependence, it's not quite obvious whether or not that's a major
problem. For example, not being able to lend a book during a few hours could
be only thing preventing some terminally-ill genius from solving some elusive
mathematical problem before he dies, while everyone else can just try to check
their books some other day when the power is back on. But so long as the
problem can be solved, the solution might be found out later on by someone
else.

On the other hand, if libraries are rendered unusable for an indefinite amount
of time, or if they become so unreliable that they aren't even worth the
effort, those would always be an issue regardless of whether there's path-
dependence.

But it sounds somewhat far-fetched to create system to ensure the reliability
of libraries in the event of say, a massive solar flare. Plus, it misses the
point: in the event of something able to take out something crucial to the
entire US library system for any appreciable length of time, the librarians
themselves would most likely have far more pressing concerns in their hands.
And that would be our new single point of failure.

I pretty much agree with scottLobster. Unless we're talking about developing
countries, where electric power is not so much intermitent as unreliable -
whereas it might take a hurricane to cause power outages in other countries, a
gush of wind here will do - it makes sense to have a system like this in
place.

~~~
aqsalose
>Plus, it misses the point: in the event of something able to take out
something crucial to the entire US library system for any appreciable length
of time, the librarians themselves would most likely have far more pressing
concerns in their hands. And that would be our new single point of failure.

I'm not exactly sure if I'm following you, but the general idea of this kind
of "resilience" is to introduce enough safety / backup measures at all points
in the society so that there is less things that hinge on "single point of
failure".

The scenario I had in mind was a national grid of a much smaller country going
down. (Apparently bringing up all the power plants back online is not as
straightforward operation as flipping some switches 'on'.) For example, in
conjunction with other crisis (say, conventional war with cyberattack
component) that would turn out to taking much longer than anticipated (because
aren't they all "over by Christmas"), so there might be an adversary
interested in keeping it down.

And the libraries are not the only institutions handling critical data that
used to be stored on paper but now exist on computers. The particular solution
of retaining backup paper card system might be silly or otherwise prove
infeasible at closer inspection, but what kind of backup systems the current
institutions have?

edit. Looking at the rest of the comments, smkellat might have provided a
splendidly simple answer upthread. At least, concerning libraries.

------
galonk
What an incredibly stupid article. The author is supposed to be talking about
card catalogues, but then keeps talking about books and libraries. We're not
getting rid of those, we're getting rid of card catalogues. Somehow I don't
think we should force librarians to keep hand-writing or typing cards for
every book, or deprive users of search functions, just for this idiot's BS Wes
Anderson aesthetic.

~~~
anigbrowl
You're really missed the point that was being made. It's not a paean to the
superiority of card catalogs, but regret for the loss of a time when they
delineated the scope of information storage relative to the scope of service
provision (the library itself).

Librarians are rarely seen as custodians of knowledge, and their job has been
downgraded to mere cataloguing. More troublingly, while the the physicality of
a card catalog, and typewritten documents before that, imposed limits and
therefore selectivity on what degree of information the government could store
about a book (and by extension about you), that limit no longer exists so the
amount of information stored has exploded while the amount of service provided
has remained the same or even diminished, to the general detriment of society.

That erstwhile necessity to consult or at least cooperate with librarians also
fostered a degree of politeness in social relations.

~~~
in_the_sticks
Bigger words don't validate whatever point is being made.

~~~
huntersbellend
Nothing like the feeling of looking up words in a physical thesaurus. Digital
ones don't give you that same sense of inflated intelligence.

~~~
cooper12
Lo, the scourge of anti-intellectualism reaches HN! Looking through their
comment, the only word that one would consider "big" might be "erstwhile".
Even if they used big words, why use that to attack them instead of
considering what they actually wrote (or taking a second to look them up)?
This smug piling on is just toxic. People shouldn't revel in ignorance.

------
jmull
"A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that
needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and
that was truly democratic."

Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to
clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of
infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work,
just like electronics. You have to be able to read the cards, and I don't
think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding
candles close to large sets of cards.

And libraries provide local terminals, so service providers, broadband and
smartphones aren't required.

As far as "democratic", card catalogs aren't bad -- if you can get to the
library during operating hours and are physically able to use one, then you
are good to go. But electronically searchable indexes are better. E.g., they
allow for remote searching, can support accessibility interfaces, etc.

~~~
scottLobster
Yeah, this whole article strikes me as one of the "I don't fully understand
modern technology so I wistfully recall the predecessor technology that I do
understand" variety.

There's a lot of these going around these days, and while it's easy to dismiss
them when they try to argue on the merits there is a certain value to them
from a design perspective. Old-school analog systems were (to the user)
tangible, comprehensible, predictable and repeatable in ways that digital
systems often fail to match. You push a button and the device does a thing.
You push that button 20 years later, still does the same thing. The response
is also tactile and immediate, having a specific feel, sound and smell. Much
the same reasons us CS nerds glorify mechanical keyboards.

I think a lot of apps/user facing products could improve from attempting to
emulate analog systems more closely. People want a piece of software that they
can use for 20 years without being thrown to the ground when the UX does a
triple-360 in the next upgrade because someone thought it was "bad design". In
the tech world we seem to gravitate towards this relentless, iterative,
constantly changing march to perceived glory when perhaps shifting the balance
back the other direction could be helpful.

------
ams6110
Not just the card catalog but the entire concept of library has been lost.
Libraries have been transformed from places where people could come to read,
research and explore into community homeless shelters that provide online porn
access and bathrooms that are basically shooting galleries.

~~~
bumblebeard
Where are you that your local library is like this?

I've been to a few public libraries in my state and none of them have been
like this. Most of them aren't very busy but they're always clean and usually
have a decent selection of books and media. My local library is especially
good; they have an entire floor devoted to children's books and I often see
families in there picking out books together.

~~~
empthought
There are news horror stories about a few major metropolitan libraries in
crime-ridden areas, and the grandfather poster generalized them to all 10,000+
other public libraries in the country.

That's the only explanation I can think of, anyway.

