Card catalog at the University of Michigan
If you’re older than about 40, chances are that you grew up using the card catalog to find library materials and had some trouble getting used to the new computer catalogs.
If you’re younger than about 30, chances are you never used one, and perhaps have never even seen one.
And yet the concept of the card catalog is still with us. Just for fun I looked up “online card catalog” on Google. The search found more than 72 million results. I see that on average Google still gets 90 searches a month on that term.
There is no such thing as an online card catalog! Where will you find catalog cards online? Not in an online catalog! Yet some of the sites on the first result page for that search are actually called “online card catalog”!
Before the card catalog
From a book catalog of the Ashmole manuscript collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (1845)
The first modern library catalogs were large books that listed a given library’s holdings. Book catalogs remained common well into the 19th century. The one pictured here is dedicated to a manuscript collection at the Bodlelian Library in Oxford and published in 1845.
They had one huge problem for a growing collection. Each new acquisition has to be added to the catalog by writing between entries or in the margins. After a while, some pages, at least, can become illegible. Then it’s necessary to make another one.
During the French Revolution, the government not only took control of the ancient royal library, it also confiscated books from monasteries and members of the nobility. The Constituent Assembly ordered a complete inventory.
Because of the violence and wartime chaos, paper for making a book catalog was in short supply. But the government had also confiscated much more than books. It also took decks of playing cards. They were larger than today’s cards and were blank on the back.
So the inventory was taken by writing the title page, author, and other bibliographic information on the cards. The author’s last name (or for books without author, a keyword in the title) was underlined to show the filing word.
Thus, the French inadvertently invented the modern card catalog. Like many of the lesser-known innovations of that time, not much came of it.
When William Croswell received a commission to create a new book catalog for Harvard University in 1812, he started by cutting the old 1790 catalog into slips. The idea apparently later inspired the university’s librarian. In 1840 Thaddeus William Harris advocate a “slip catalog” for staff use made of pieces of card of uniform size.
The heyday of the card catalog
Library catalog cards. Top to bottom: library hand, typed, printed
Card catalogs first became commonplace in both the US and Britain by the 1870s. At first, those cards were written by hand. Melville Dewey and Thomas Edison collaborated on the creation of a “library hand,” and good handwriting became one of the basic requirements for being a librarian.
Dewey also founded a company called the Library Bureau in 1881 for the purpose of selling supplies to libraries. By 1886, it was selling not only catalog cards, but cabinets to hold them.
The chief advantage of the card catalog over the book catalog is that new acquisitions can easily be filed without making any older part of the catalog obsolete. That, in turn, made it easy to include added entries.
The “main entry” in a card catalog had all of the bibliographic information about a book. It was usually filed according to the author’s name. The added entry had such additional information as the title, additional authors, alternate titles, subject headings, and anything else that seemed necessary.
When librarians wrote cards by hand, the added entries included the bare minimum of information that could lead interested users to the main entry.
In 1901, the Library of Congress began to sell printed sets of its cards. Printed cards made it easier to list the required added entries at the bottom of the card and distribute sets of identical cards—one for the main entry and others for the added entries. Then all the purchasing libraries needed to do was type the added entries at the top of the cards.
Over the course of the reign of the card catalog, libraries were also attempting to agree on a set of uniform cataloging rules. That way a patron of one library could go to any other and use its catalog without having to be trained in local procedures.
That consideration brings us to one of three big disadvantages of the card catalog. A catalog in an old library could be expected to have handwritten cards for its oldest holdings and cards for successive changes of cataloging rules. So the cards were not uniform in layout, appearance, or the information they contained.
If new acquisitions did not eventually require the replacement of an old catalog, the more drastic rule changes often required replacement of card sets. For example, at one time the rules required authors to be identified by the fullest form of their given name.
Pen names like Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain were not usable. The catalog had to have cross-reference cards to send patrons to Charles Ludwig Dodgson and Samuel Langhorne Clemens instead. Then after a while, library land decided that was a bad idea.
Thus the second disadvantage of the card catalog. Whenever the rules changed, librarians had to pull all the older cards and edit them to conform. When they changed again. librarians had to find and change some of the same cards. That happened in 1908, then in the 1940s, then in the 1960s or 70s. (Imprecise, I know, but the history is complicated.)
The third disadvantage ultimately killed the card catalog. It took up a lot of space. In a large library, the catalog could occupy an entire large room at the expense of tables and chairs for patrons to sit.
The demise of the card catalog
Cathode ray tube monitor (IBM PC 5150)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Henriette Avram, a computer programmer and systems analyst at the Library of Congress, developed Machine Readable Cataloging, or MARC. At first, she intended it as a means of automating the printing of catalog cards, but it soon became the basis for today’s online library catalogs.
Of course, online didn’t exist yet. At first, many libraries stopped adding new cards to their catalogs and substituted microfilm catalogs instead. Everything in the card catalog could fit on one or more spools of microfilm.
The microfilm reader let patrons find the approximate location of an image of a catalog card at high speed. From there, it didn’t take long to find the exact card.
The Chicago Public Library required four different readers to accommodate its entire collection. Each one took no more space than a desktop computer (which, remember, few individuals owned yet.) Like an old book catalog, a microfilm catalog quickly became obsolete, but it was cheap enough to make a new one every few months.
One by one a few libraries attempted to use a computer for their catalogs. Patrons absolutely hated them. Few knew how to use computers at all, and no two libraries came up with quite the same way of looking for and finding information in an electronic catalog.
But then personal computers became popular. Some enterprising companies began to sell standardized catalog interfaces to libraries. The means of searching the catalog on a computer became good enough to gain general acceptance.
After that, one library after another moved all its holdings to the computer and got rid of the card catalogs. By that time, there was hardly a murmur of complaint from patrons. They could find more information standing in one place than they could ever have found by moving from drawer to drawer.
Even the earliest of these catalogs were not online. Patrons used them through monochromatic dumb terminals similar to the one on the old IBM PC pictured above. In the late 1990s I worked in a library that had those terminals.
It occupied the 6th through 10th floors of a high-rise building. The card catalog had been on the 6th floor. A computerized catalog meant that there could be a terminal on every floor. Other libraries had already moved their catalogs from dumb terminals to desk-top computers that tapped into the World Wide Web.
I would hesitate to claim that no libraries have card catalogs any more, but by no later than 2000 the computerized catalog had driven card catalogs out of the vast majority of them. Library catalog departments always have a shelf list in the back room. Card catalogs lasted there longer than in public areas, but they too have moved online.
A whole generation has now grown up with no memory of the card catalog. And there are tons of library card cabinets just begging for someone to use them again. Some time I’ll have to show you some of those uses.
Sources:
Evolution of the library card catalog
History of the card catalog
Photo credits:
Card catalog. University of Michigan via Creative Commons.
Ashmole catalog. Screen shot from Open Library
Library catalog cards. Cornell University Library.
Cathode ray tube monitor. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons.
