File this away.

Mine's here (but I saw it at Mark Chu-Carroll's place first...)

Years ago, I worked in a university library helping to convert card catalog records to online records. The old cards were fascinating. The oldest cards were painstakingly handwritten, in India ink, and I learned to recognize the handwriting of many different catalogers. There was something deeply personal about the handwritten cards. I imagined I could tell something about the people who had written them. (Surely the one who held a ruler under each line as she wrote it had OCD?)

When the project was eventually finished, they held a silent auction and sold each empty cabinet to the highest bidder. There was a lot of demand ... I guess many of us were feeling nostalgic. Years later, I saw a much smaller card cabinet in a mail-order catalog, for a ridiculous price. I felt a pang and wished I'd bought a *real* one when I had the chance. What would I have done with it? I don't know, but I still wish I had one.

Ah, card catalogs! I still love them too. I can still even do Dewey Decimal cataloging - truly a dying art.

Old card catalog cabinets become available as older libraries convert to online, but they are in big demand -- often by hobbyists and collectors for organizing and storing small objects.

(sigh)

I like that you've put yourself if the Qs--the women-in-science books around Q130 are among my favorites. :)

I was lucky enough to get a small one (one of the perks of dating a librarian). They are still available from library supply companies, but they ain't cheap. Though I love the convenience of looking things up on line from home in whatever I happen to be wearing, I HATE being in the library looking at 5 terminals where previously there was space for 100 people.

OK, I'm nerdy enough to memorize the catalogue numbers of what I'm interested in and go look that way.

I suspect I am in a small cohort of biologists that started their assistant professorships just as their university library was going all electronic. The result? We scammed a lot of card catalogues.

I am the proud owner of two gorgeous solid oak jobs in my lab, perhaps 200 drawers of anal retentive goodness. Each drawer is chock full of vials, and those vials are chock full of ants.

Viva el revolucion electronico!

Getting things done in Academia
a guide for graduate students

As a librarian, I have no love for card catalogs. For just one book, we had to create a card for each subject heading, the title, and the author. Then we had to file them. We were always behind on filing because you couldn't trust just anyone to do the job. The catalogs were impossible to keep accurate. They weren't fun to search in, either, if you were a user. For example, a good cataloger might create a number of "see" or "see also" cards. So you'd look under "pilots" over in the "Ps" and find a "see Airplane pilots," so you'd have to walk to the "As." The *second* we went online, I chucked the card catalog--well, actually, I donated it to a separate branch library that wasn't as aggressive as I was. We used another one for our audiocassette collection. Not only do online catalogs work better, they're much easier to maintain. Card catalogs--yuck!

Back in the mid 1970s [yep, I am older than dirt] Arthur D Little [a consultancy, a think tank of futurists that, despite a century of pioneering management consulting, could not foresee the consequences of getting to big for their breeches] had contracted to provide the little Forest Press that had stewardship of the Dewey Decimal system with a way to computerize themselves. At that time, they literally had rooms and musty rooms full of shoeboxes with 3x5 cards and some incredibly smart, completely irreplacable old brains that were beginning to feel the tide of exponential knowledge growth lapping at their nostrils. The tools with which I was to pull off this miracle were a PDP-11 and Basic-11. I sought work elsewhere. The trips to Washington DC would have killed me. The one flight I did take down there netted exactly one memorable experience: sitting next to Ted Kennedy [we did not speak a word] who anxiously read a NYTimes magazine article purporting to tell its readers who the heck this Jimmy Carter person was. There is no Dewey Decimal number for that.

Your nostalgia is not misplaced, Janet. But nostalgia is for the sake of the nostalgic, not for the sake of the objects. I, after all, collect mechanical adding machines. But I do not compute on them.

Jude, for instance, gives us a glimpse at the impossibility of a task for which the sheer volume of labor could employ most of literate mankind were there no way to automate it. You can actually loose a paper card rather easily. A command something like
"cp -r /home/bibliomni /dev/optical/bibliomni_0701BKP"
is all you type to create a perfect backup of a catalog. How do you checkpoint the everchanging state [and the state is all that matters, not the termite food] of a library's catalog? Do any two libraries have the same collection of books [never mind what is check out, what is checked in but missing]? Discovering the overlap between two libraries is a few lines of code for compatible on-line catalogs.

Thank heavens the library science folks haven't fallen into the tar pit of search-vs-organize;)

Apropos of nothing, but I was wondering about your take on Larry Moran's Ethical Issues in Science .