Maybe that is why there are 200 cases of missing remains at Arlington. Or, maybe that is why there are ONLY 200 cases of missing remains at Arlington.
Buffalo; the central branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system. The card catalogs are for the Grovesnor collection (local history; it’s a very large collection) and the music/record/CD collection.
Yes. You can’t use a slide rule, or calculate a square root. But, with the help of nature’s trusty wikipedia you can figure both out! No need to rely on computers.
Anyway. Dumb jokes aside. These people who are having trouble with the card catalogs you mention have probably never been to exposed to them, therefore they are understandably confused. With a little explanation I am sure they could figure it out. In general libraries seem to be in the process of doing away with card catalogs and having indexes computerized. They use their resources to teach people how to use computers to do searches, instead of how to use the card catalog.
I get my Wikipedia on stone tablets, like God intended!
Anyway, valleyofthedolls, I see your point, but as computers become increasingly prevalent, people will increasingly need them to do things that not long ago we could have done without them. There’s so many things that any random person in 1900 was able to do that I’m not even aware of, that I can’t get too worked up about it. And anyway, the reason why I dragged us into this (admittedly irrelevant) argument was rather the fact that you said that if it was up to you, you would get rid of the computer database and only keep the paper card one. I know you weren’t exactly serious, but I still felt the need to take issue with this particular statement. I don’t intend to keep dragging the thread in this direction.
I looked those things up on Wikipedia but I’m also capable of going through card catalogs and pulling books so that I can teach myself how to use a slide rule etc.
Look, I’ve just seen too many people who are completely stymied whenever they have to do something without the aid of a computer. It’s not that they don’t know how, it’s also that they refuse to even try. There are billions of things that I don’t know how to do. If I had to do them though, I’m pretty sure I could manage (cold fusion, aside) with or without the help of a computer. From what I’ve seen, there are a lot of peole out there who can’t say that. YMMV and again, sorry for the OT nature of my reply.
I went to school in the days before not only computers, but also handheld calculators, and I still never used a slide rule for anything. Wasn’t a geek. (Just a nerd.)
I’m reminded of a science-fiction story in which a young lad in the future figured out multiplication on his own. This was such a discovery that he was being interviewed by top government and, more importantly, military officials. He demonstrated how to multiply, using only paper and pencil, say 155 x 3. That’s 5 x 3, carry the 1, then … etc. This was such a radical discovery – math calculations without the aid of any sort of calculator or computer, something anyone could do with nothing but paper and pencil – that it was classified top secret and determined to give a military advantage over the country’s enemies.
Not really big enough to count, but the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens has a research library that’s indexed with a card catalog. It has the largest collection of books on Asian studies in the Southeastern United States.
Yeah but you’re not asking people to look up how to use a slide rule, you’re saying that people should be given a slide rule and instinctively know how to use it. You’re admitting that you need a secondary source to tell you how to use the item. Why would say that a slide rule requires a manual and a card catalogue doesn’t?
Card catalogs did have at least one significant advantage over computers, in that the number of simultaneous searchers wasn’t limited by the number of terminals. One library I know of made the switch, from a bureau of a couple hundred drawers of cards, to a table of four computers.
Because I’m assuming the people staring dumbly at the card catalogs were taught, at some point, how to use numbers and the alphabet. Using those concepts, you should be able to intuit out how to obtain a book from the library without using a computer. You’re right about slide rules, though. I looked at a picture of one and think I’ve got a pretty good idea of how they work but would probably need to read some instructions to come up with accurate figures. That said, I’m not interested in an argument. It’s my belief that people who can’t figure out, by themselves, how to use a card catalog are stupid. If you disagree, that’s great.
Our local library doesn’t even have a card catalogue, let alone a computerized one. We have the librarian. We ask her where a book is, and she tells us.
I got my library degree from UB a year ago now and allow me to chime with the lowdown on this particular catalog.
The card catalog is still in place in the Grovesnor collection purely for aesthetic reasons. People think it’s cute to see a card catalog in a local history section so the library maintains it. You’ll find this in many local history departments. It’s nostalgia, not any kind of reluctence to upgrade.
Of course, the Buffalo and Erie County system is just coming back from some crippling budget cuts a few years ago, so they likely couldn’t have done it even if they wanted to.
Yeah, but for some reason there’d always be somebody in the exact drawer you needed (or one in the same stack, so you couldn’t use it anyway.)
The debate of “card catalog versus computer” is just another way of saying “Do we really need to learn outdated technology?”
My mum went to college and they made her learn Latin. Well she had to take a year of it for her degree in nursing. This was in the 40s. Did you really need to learn Latin? She said she didn’t and nurses don’t learn it today.
I can see both sides. It amazes me that people can’t do simple addition in their head, but on the other hand, I don’t see why anyone should waste time trying to figure out what the square root of a number is manually.
Man, in my local library, when the power goes out, there often aren’t any candles at hand. I’m not saying lightbulbs aren’t useful, but kids these days really oughtn’t be so reliant upon them.
If you’ve never used a card catalog before, you would be a little flummoxed when you first had to; you wouldn’t necessarily have an instinctual feel for how they are organized, which kinds of data you should be organizing your searches along and so on. You might wonder how to tell if a book is actually available or out on loan or various other pieces of information you are accustomed to having at your fingertips. It takes time to puzzle it out; I recall they used to bother teaching us this stuff in elementary school, and even testing us on it, which suggests it was not thought of as intuitively obvious.
As for being unable to find a book on a shelf, well, that’s got nothing to do with computers, does it?
The Library of Congress seems to think so. They have developed the MARC21 cataloguing format and managed to sell it to large parts of the World. For those who are not familiar with MARC formats they can best be describes as ways to break down the description of a book into smaller chunks called fields and subfields. In the good old days when we typed catalogue cards the various pieces of information were separated by a special punctuation like:
Title : other title statements / author. - Place of publishing : publisher, time of publication. - Pagination
etc.
With the advent of computerised catalogues the need for this punctuation disappeared as it could be added by a computer program when a record had to be edited in some way. Enter the bright minds of the LoC who decided that cataloguers had to add it themselves and they didn’t even understand exactly in what situation it should be added. All in all when the Swedish libraries started using MARC21 the cataloguers had to go back 30 years in time in my opinion and start using an outdated, if not technology, so at least an outdated approach to their job.
The mission of my library is not to force people to process information and work out problems for themselves.
My thing is that very few people actually used the card catalogs when they were there. Almost everyone asked the librarian for help if they couldn’t find a book. Quite a lot of people didn’t even do that, and just browsed all the shelves.
I find even the computer catalog isn’t used that often, but I hope that’s because it’s available online.
I do not think that a person’s inability to use a card catalog is an adequate indicator of intelligence. It’s an antiquated system that is seldom used or taught anymore. As another user pointed out, this would be like your grandfather calling you stupid for not knowing how to use a slide rule… also take for example solving basic mathematical functions using logarithms, or navigating using a sextet, or telling time using a sundial, or growing food using three field crop rotation. These things were all fairly common knowledge at one time.
The use of a traditional card catalog is largely deprecated. Just because it was done so in your lifetime doesn’t mean people are stupid because they haven’t learned it. They don’t need to.
zombie or no
i tried navigating with a sextet once but they all wanted to go different directions.