Moving On From Card Catalogues

This morning I came across yet another on line discussion of the joys of library card catalogues, this one on Twitter. A lady said she missed them and was immediately and enthusiastically endorsed by people who were using a smart phone or a computer to do something we couldn’t do back in the days of card catalogues. 

I think I may have been the only one to say I didn’t miss them at all, and why, and the lady courteously agreed that she saw my point but did miss cards all the same.  

I thought this might make a blog post. If you’re young, you probably won’t even know what a card catalogue looks like. In fact, one of the folk in that thread was a librarian and said that a small part of their collection was filed in catalogue drawers and how excited people were when she brought them to the counter. I can see that: we had a typewriter for spine labels in our back room, because it was safer than trying to do it on our photocopier/printer where they might just jam. And it was an electronic typewriter, which was very exciting back in the days of manual typewriters. The kids would visit the library workroom and say, “Ooh, what’s that? Is it a typewriter? Wow!” 

Doesn’t mean you want to have no other option. 

So, here are my memories of card catalogues. That’s where I started as a librarian. Heck, it’s where I started in my schooldays! I even remember card catalogues at the State Library. What are they? 

They are filing cabinets with drawers that are filled with cards that tell you what books the library holds. To use them, you need to understand the concept of subject, title and author, which have separate drawers. Subject is the worst, because most books have been catalogued under more than one subject, and they might not be in the same drawer. For example, there might be a card under “Ancient Egypt”. The same book might be about food in Ancient Egypt. You might, of course, find one under Ancient Egypt - Food, but if you want to check out food in various cultures you might have to go to a different drawer, under Food. Which might lead you to the cookbooks. Or some librarian might have decided to put the whole thing under food. I have been known to recatalogue old books I thought were in the wrong area, and it took me a couple of minutes to do on the computer. It would take at least half an hour with cards. Trust me! 

Manchester Central Library. Creative Commons. Flickr ricardo266

Which leads me to what you do when a book goes missing or you have withdrawn it. Don’t even get me started on CARDS that go missing because someone pulled them out of the drawer to look up a book and never returned them! Grr! 

Remember what I said about five cards per book? At least! There is a set of cards you keep in the workroom, filed in Dewey order. They represent every book in the library. You use those for stocktake purposes, when you check to see which books have gone missing. In a small card catalogue library like the one I started in, that can take three weeks, and you have to close. (Only a few days with a computer catalogue, and you don’t have to close the library, plus you can do it any time) There is one card each for author and title, maybe more than one author card if the book was co-written. Subject? It’s very rarely you only give one subject for a book. I’d say at least two, probably more. Each with its own cute little card. So, once you’ve gone through the shelves and you’re sure the missing books are really missing, not overdue, let’s say about 100 books are missing. That might be a minimum of about 500 cards you have to pull. 

Starting to get why I was so very happy when I came to a library with computer records? And that’s not counting trying to teach library skills to kids who are sent to look up books and can’t find them because the cards are missing. 

Aren’t there any disadvantages to computer records? you cry. Well, yes, if the power goes off, you are helpless. But that doesn’t happen often and let’s face it, if the power fails you can’t see anything anyway and still have to wait for it to return. Look, I love my little portable Olivetti, which is lighter than my laptop and won’t crash and lose all my work, but I wouldn’t trade my computer for it. If I make a mistake I can fix it immediately. 

If you have a computer catalogue you can, if you wish, subscribe to a cataloguing service, download and get on with your other work, especially looking after patrons. Yes, I enjoy cataloguing, but it’s nice to have the option. And yes, you could subscribe to those services in the old days, but you had to send them your books and wait for cards to come back. And file them. 

It’s better for library patrons too. You don’t need special training to look up the book you want and chances are that you will find something else you didn’t know the library had, because typing in your word will get you everything available - and you’ll know immediately if the book is out, unlike with a card catalogue, and you can reserve it if it is. Some catalogues even have links to useful web sites connected with those books. If it’s a public library, it will for sure subscribe to e-magazines and encyclopaedias. That is why I encouraged our students to join the local library if they hadn’t already, which could offer them resources my budget didn’t cover. And you can renew your loan online. 

The National Library of Australia has Trove, which has digitised newspapers going back to 1803 and magazines from the 1930s onwards. It’s free for all to use. Tell me you can do that with a card catalogue! 

There’s one more thing that makes me glad to have had computer records. The other year, my school discovered that most of my library furniture, very old as it was, had asbestos in it. I have no idea where you could hide asbestos in wood, but there you go! They took away my checkout desk, my trollies and the shelves on which we kept the encyclopaedias. Okay... the checkout desk was replaced with a snazzy brand new one and I’d been trying to get money for that for ages. We found space elsewhere for the encyclopaedias. I only got one new trolley, but I managed. 

Now, imagine if I’d had a card catalogue, wooden like the rest, bought at the same time... where on earth would I keep all those cards as I waited for a new one? Nobody would buy a catalogue cabinet, no matter how elegant, with asbestos in it!