The card was designed to be able to write names (in my case) or card numbers (for larger libraries) on it. It was lined and the information was written on each line.
And, yes, you could pick up a book and see who took it out previously.
I think the most likely system would be to put them in a file box by due date. Thus there would be a little divider for each day (in our library, books were borrowed for 14 days maximum, so you’d need only 14 dividers plus some extra for overdues). Within each divider the cards would be sorted by the name or number. If you called to ask how many books you had out (which doesn’t seem likely – you were limited to two), they’d ask the due date or the date you took it out and they could find the information.
I never had a library card, BTW. The librarian knew who I was. She probably knew most of the town on sight.
We had that in elementary school. It was fun. Also, in textbooks we used. I remember one kid got the same exact textbook his older sister had used the year before.
There’s a movie which has a card-based library circulation system as a major plot point: Whisper of the Heart. In it, Shizuku Tsukishima notices that she’s borrowing he same library books as another student named Seiji Amasawa. Their relationship develops from their common circulation history.
I remember that system. The machine also took a little chunk off of one side of the card, so that the next time the card was inserted in the machine, it went juuust a little farther, positioning the card so that the next imprint was the right distance below the previous.
That sounds complicated, but it was an ingenious system.
Actually, the photograph system was very common, used in libraries all over North America. It wasn’t as much trouble as it sounded like. It took only a few seconds per picture, and they were taken on microfilm, so they didn’t take up much space.
When they first switched over to computers, Rutgers University library had an IBM card punch machine at the checkouts. When you took out a book they manually punched in the call number on the card, along with your information, then duplicated the card. One went into a stack to be batch-processed in those pre-network days, the other into the card holder glued into the book from pre-computer days. Checking out a stack of books could take a long time. And I kinda miss than quaint Ka-CHUNK, chunka-chunka-chunka-CHUNK of the old IBM card punches. Nowadays they just laser-scan the bar code and it all automatically goes into the system.
We didn’t have those. In fact, we didn’t even have library cards (small town). The librarian (who had been there for years) knew everyone.
This is the type of thing I was talking about.. The due date was stamped as shown, and your name written in. The card would then be filed. I would think it was by due date, since the due date was on the book when it came back.
There was a second slip attached to the book that just had room to stamp the due date. Sometimes it was in the back of the pocket shown in the photo; other times it was a sheet of paper about 3" x 5" with a gummed edge on one of the shorter sides (the top). The librarian would stick this into the book. If it filled up, she’d stick a new one on, often right on top of the old one (or just remove the old one).
You’d hand the librarian the book. She’d (it was always a “she” back then) take out the slip, stamp it with the due date and write in your name (or library card number). She’d then stamp the due date on the slip inside the book. I liked that part of it because you could always find the due date.
I have worked with both systems (if I remember correctly the card one is called the Detroit system). Once when I was checking out books with a microfilm camera the borrower complained that there was no card in one of them and I explained that it happened that they disappear and that we didn’t type a new one as we didn’t use them (other than when we lent books to branch libraries). Then I got the scolding of my life, because he used them. He always wrote down his number from the old card system days and if he saw it in a book he knew he didn’t have to read it again.
I also used to work in small branch that was open just a couple of hours a week, serving the local children. When I was away for a year at library school I was replaced by someone who was absolutely clueless about the card system, so whenever he couldn’t find the card immediately when a book was returned he just wrote a new one and placed it in the book. The result was that when I came back I went through overdue loans and sent out loads of reminders to people, who weren’t too pleased with it. In the end I had to find all his replacement cards and throw away the extras and after that I went through all books to put the correct cards in them.
For anyone who may still be wondering, in the small library systems that I remember using as a kid, this is what a typical card would look like and this is the pocketglued inside the book. Alternatively, a temporary due date slip could be glued to the pocket and peeled off whenever it was full.
My elementary school would take the cards and sort them by borrower’s name into something like this, with newer cards going at the back, so the top of each pile would be the ones closest to the due dates.
In the 1970’s the library had an electric stamper machine that date stamped the card from the book.
My library card had a metal plate in it that transferred my id # when it was stamped.
The other point with the due-date-card and photo system… The due-date cards were basically a punch-card with a serial number and a prestamped due date. The checkout desk had a tray of them, in numerical order, prestamped with the Saturday 2 weeks away, so you had the rest of the week plus 2 weeks.
For checkout, the librarian laid down 3 cards - library card, book pocket card, and the next due-date card from a big tray. Push a button to take a picture. Leave the library card, put other 2 in pocket; repeat for next book for same person. Library card went with the other two in the last book the person checked out.
Because the cards were in order - the roll of film was labelled with start and end cards. Cards were fed through a computer or other gizmo to generate a list of missing sequence cards. Examine the film for that checkout card in sequence, and note details. If book is returned in time no need to look at the film; retuned late, cross the due-date card number/ book off the missing/overdue list.
Every so often people forgot to take their library card out of the pocket before returning their books…
There are some interesting tricks you can do with punch cards that do not require a fancy computer; I’m sure you can imagine, creating a machine that you set to a specific number, feed sorted cards into it, and it tells you which cards in the sequence are missing… Sorting cards is trivial and every computer shop in those days had a mechanical card sorter. (Sort by lowest digit, then by 10’s, then by 100’s column etc. - eventually all cards are sorted in order…) IBM made their mark in punch cards years before there were computers.
When you were dealing with 10,000 books a day across 16 or 20 branches, this system made sense. When I worked at the bigger branch, they would fill a librabry cart - 3 shelves, double sided, 4 feet long - within a few minutes during busy return times.
This thread is brining back such fine memories. As others have explained our local library had the metal plate on card punching system. One cool thing was since every book had it’s own card with the borrowers numbers stamped on it you knew how many people checked out the book before you did. I can remember “feeling sorry” for books especially older ones without a lot of stamps on their card like no one wanted them.
This reminds me of a nasty prank we pulled in High School (in the 70’s). We noticed that the librarians (who were rather surly) didn’t really look closely at the cards when you checked books out. So (the bastards that we were), we took about 16 books from random shelves and swapped their cards. We figured some of the books would eventually get checked out but the wrong book would be on record as being out. When someone returned one of the tainted books, its card wouldn’t be there to match - and the card that the person signed would eventually become overdue even though it was never was checked out in the first place. Hillarious right? Well we were stupid pricks. One afternoon they announced the library was going to be closed for a day. I believe it was to go over every damn book to make sure it had the proper card. I’ll get a day in pergatory for that.
