The way of the card catalog

The Online Computer Library Center shipped its last batch of library catalog cards this week. Many people under age 30 have never seen a card catalog in a public or university library, much less used one.

Catalog cards were OCLC’s original business and they printed around 1.9 billion cards over 40 years. They once shipped out 8 tons of cards a week. OCLC is an Ohio company with a centralized database of shared catalog records, long essential to the library world.  The cards they sold were reproduced efficiently, rather than each library creating the same card over and over.

I've not a cataloger (thank goodness) so I've never had to make one, but producing cards is a labor-intensive and tedious task that takes about an hour. Each book requires multiple cards: one for subject, one for author, one for title. Cards have to be hand-typed exactly without any error.

They estimate that OCLC cooperative cataloging has saved librarians about 195,000 years of administrative effort.  The change from card catalogs to to OPAC (online public access catalogs) was just getting started in the mid-80's when I was in library school. But I remember the massive banks of wood card catalogs still in use at the UW library. Now you sometimes see them in antique and curio stores.

For decades, these cabinets and their thousands of cardboard index cards were, essentially, the library's information center.  Before the Internet, a catalog card was the closest thing to a hyperlink, taking you from a brief description right to the full resource without the help of a librarian. For more than 100 years, they were the pinnacle of information seeking technology.

In another way they were works of art, representing countless hours of intellectual effort and containing more than just dry information. With their notes, cross-references and scribbles, they were library history.

Some small libraries still have their card catalogs, of course.  I used the one at the MOHAI library recently to find some books on the shelf. It worked just fine, but like their "clipping file" (another library relic) it isn't updated any longer.