Thursday, October 15, 2015

Farewell to the Card Catalog

Not very long ago I linked to a post about the making of the last cards for library card catalogs.  By coincidence, a friend who works at a library where they're getting rid of the card catalog brought me a small stack of the cards for my books.  Here are a couple of them for old time's sake.

9 comments:

pattinase (abbott) said...

Now that is a lovely gift. I have to say though computers make the job much easier. So some things in the "new days" are an improvement.

sandra seamans said...

I used to type those cards for my high school library when new books came in. And yes, that was ages ago :)

Deb said...

What a neat (and thoughtful) gift!

I think I mentioned on the previous card catalog post that it was Hurricane Katrina that finally pushed our local library to go to an electronic card catalog. I was making cards for an elementary library until 2007; the students were getting card catalog lessons until 2009 when the "old school" librarian retired.

Electronic catalogs make information retrieval much faster, but the incidental acquisition of knowledge when you just "found" books while looking for something else...that world is totally gone.

Rick Robinson said...

Very cool. At one time I wanted one of the card catalog cases, wood with all those drawers. Now I'm not sure what I'd do with it.

mybillcrider said...

It would look great, even if it was empty.

Cap'n Bob said...

You probably need one of the cabinets to hold the cards for all your books, Bill.

mybillcrider said...

I have a feeling that a lot of them never got into libraries.

Stephen B. said...

They actually had a college course or orientation, and part of it was on filing and the Dewey Decimal System -- I simply took a test (from spending most of my lunch-time hours in high school actually in a library) and I got the credit and passed. We also had a requirement to attend public speaking events

and that year I GOT TO SEE MAYA ANGELOU and got to see RAY BRADBURY (I was able to talk with him for a minut and got a book signed). Joyous!

mybillcrider said...

That's the way college should be.