Column: The card catalogue, once upon a time the library’s search engine

Are you old enough to remember going into a library and first heading to the card catalogue? You’d pull out one of the long, rectangular drawers and search through the index cards to find the call number of the book you were looking for.

Are you old enough to remember going into a library and first heading to the card catalogue? You’d pull out one of the long, rectangular drawers and search through the index cards to find the call number of the book you were looking for. You didn’t need Wi-Fi or an electronic device.

You just needed legs with knees that would bend in case you had to search in a drawer low down in the cabinet, and fingers to leaf through the index cards. If you had problems, there were always real human librarians on hand to help. (As an aside, Vancouver Public Library still has its card catalogues but they’re not on display; Richmond Public Library hasn’t kept theirs, I was told by the librarians.)

Libraries, big or small, had character, they had individuality. The cards and the drawers in the catalogue cabinet were part and parcel of the place; they became an integral part of your experience. It was almost as if the contents of the library were distilled into cards, those rectangles of paper filled with words and numbers.

To begin with they were unique to that place, you would not find them anywhere else. Catalogue cards were handwritten at first. Thus it was essential for librarians to be able to write legibly, and Melvil Dewey (who in 1876 devised the classification method for non-fiction books) provided instructions on the types of cursive to be used on the cards.

A quarter of a century later, in October 1901, the Library of Congress began printing the catalogue cards and distributing them to other libraries. In 1971, the cooperative known as the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) initiated printing catalogue cards to provide to libraries. It carried on until 2015, that’s 44 years, by which time 1.9 billion cards had been printed.

However, new ways for cataloguing were brewing already as early as the 1950s. In 1965 the mathematician Henriette Avram joined the Library of Congress and set about devising the first automated cataloguing system called Machine-Readable-Cataloging (MARC). Development of newer, faster library catalogue systems has never ceased.

Today library catalogues are largely online. They offer a totally different experience. Online catalogues can be accessed anywhere.

They are cut off from their physical source, they have escaped from the library. Still, without Wi-Fi and an electronic device an online library catalogue is as good as dead. I admit they’re fast and handy to consult, especially if you’re not in the library.

Yet the experience of using a library’s resources is a completely different one. You’re no longer interacting with the library’s character or individuality. It makes me think of a somewhat sanitized, one-size-fits-all situation.

It’s a virtual experience rather than a ‘sensational’ experience because you’re only using one of your senses – sight – to read what’s on the device screen. Previously, searching through a library catalogue involved your sense of touch (your fingers leafed through the cards) and your sense of smell (yes, card catalogues did have a smell; the older, the smellier). My fingers have had the good fortune (and privilege) to leaf through some amazing card catalogues.

To name just a few: those of major, world-famous libraries such as the British Library in London and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, but also those of smaller though no less important libraries such as the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. I’m convinced my serendipitous discoveries wouldn’t have happened if my only contact with the catalogues had been through a screen. Sabine Eiche is a local writer and art historian with a PhD from Princeton University.

Her passions are writing for children and protecting nature. Her columns deal with a broad range of topics and often include etymology in order to shed extra light on the subject. 📣 Got an opinion on this story or any others in Richmond?

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