And a second day for misspelling purgatory.
They changed the name to Durango Mountain Resort. It didn’t take so now it is Purgatory at Durango Mountain Resort. But good news you can get a deal on a two day pass.
Ha! Good catch.
Speaking of old libraries…
Is the Dewey Decimal Classification dead?
I’ve heard the Universal Decimal Classification works better with computers.
Remember when retail businesses used to put your credit card into a device, put a multi-part carbon form, and manually charge to your card, and someone later did whatever manual entry was neccessary to get it on your charge account? That is what the libraries here in San Jose did in the 60’s and 70’s and even 80’s until our first automated (computerized) system was installed. Your plastic card was inserted on one side, and EVERY book had a plastic card with author/title. The due date was set on the machine, like a date stamp, and you ran a paper transaction for every book. One paper went into the book pocket with the plastic card, and the remainder were filed together by a printed number on the receipt fotrm. When books were returned, the paper was pulled and shredded. After an appropriate length of time, remaining slips were gathered together and the overdue clerk sent out manually typed notices. Boy, I sure welcomed computers! Remember, widespread automation of library procedures, including the card catalog, is a recent (early 80"s maybe?) event.
I remember that one! 
Iam claimed that he had mistakenly kicked the field goal wide right, and had no idea where the football had gone at that point. Leroy was immediately suspicious of this story because Mr. Gillty had told the the tale without a trace of a European accent. The iron-clad proof, however, was when Leroy tossed his crumpled library card in front of a walking Gillty and the perp kicked it straight ahead with his boot. Leroy knew that if he were a real placekicker, he would have taken three steps backwards, then two steps to the side, then removed his boot, then kicked the scrap paper with the instep of his bare foot, as all placekickers do! This was all the evidence Leroy’s cop father needed to beat the suspect with his baton, then remand him to the Idaville city jail holding cell where he was anally raped by “Butch” Kimball. The last thing Iam remembered was a fellow felon crouched fetal-style in the corner muttering “A narrow flight…An arrow flight…A narrow flight" over and over.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell the librarians to make sure when you check it out you inspect the card closer? 
No. As an example I can tell that the Swedish National library and the rest of the Swedish library community is in the middle of a process to start using Dewey instead of the Classification System For Swedish Libraries (Klassifikationssystem för svenska bibliotek) maintained by the Swedish Library Association.
If you come to New York you can stay at the Library Hotel, where each room has a Dewey code (and my old classification teacher commented that had they chosen UDC instead they could have had more rooms with a better range of coding).
I was going to post this in a recent thread about obsolete jobs but never got around to it.
I worked for a company that provided microfilm services to the City of Toronto Library system. Each branch had at least one camera on the checkout desk, maybe as simple as a little Kodak rotary camera. Your library card was fed together with a card from inside the book.
Someone else from our company drove around the city and picked up the film cassettes for processing.
I never really knew what happened to the developed images. I don’t think they went back to the branches. Maybe to the head office.
It was my job to fix the cameras and reader/printers.
Yes. I remember the camera thingy too, in our small branch library. A Buffalo thing?
if the library started using Dewey a century ago and it is a local public library then it may still use it.
every public library i’ve been in uses Dewey.
libraries are sacred temples of knowledge. i don’t think you will get off that easy.
you better do some volunteer work at your local library.
There’s no reason to change systems, once you have a huge collection already tagged with it. Whatever advantage any other system might have with computers is hardly worth the effort.
WRT checking books: The UC Berkeley main stacks were still transferring some books to computer records when I worked there. They’d been using IBM punch cards. The book had a card, and the patron filled out a blank (unpunched) card in ink when checking it out. Then a library worker would run the two cards through a punch machine which copied the encoding of the book’s identity to the blank, while typing in the patron’s library ID info (and date, etc.). Huge batches of the cards were run through the IBM every day to see what was due, returned, recalled, etc.
No, it isn’t. DDC is still the norm for public libraries and K-12 school libraries in the US. Some American universities also use DDC, but this isn’t especially common – most use Library of Congress Classification.
I don’t think I’ve ever even been in a UDC library. They told us in library school that this classification system was more common outside the US.
Hey cool! I worked at UC Berkeley (Doe Library, aka The Main Library) in the 70s. Your description is spot on, except that there was no copying of encoding via machine…I would sit at a keypunch machine with a stack newly returned books, and type (with my fingers) the call number onto a card.
Whenever a customer couldn’t find a book, we had look through the card file to make sure it was indeed checked out (as opposed to misplaced) and when it was due back.
Faculty were never required to return books. We once sent out a polite letter, asking them to return anything they were no longer using, and did get some response – which resulted in some very ancient dog eared punch cards finally falling out of the card file.
Enormously civil of you, and cyber cakes and ale to you. Three cheers! It is better than saying “Hah! Well, WE think that you do have that book and our word is final. Give us lots of money now, or be forever cast into outer darkness.”
Didn’t that ever lead to problems? I mean, in the sense that sometimes, perfectly good and ethical people, “respected academics” or whatever, who would certainly take any lost property they found to the police station, and who would be nice to kittens and puppies, donate to charity, help old people cross the road etc., might sometimes have a bit of an ethical blind spot when it comes to much wanted books?
(N.B. This is not purely my own cynical view but one that was expressed, not entirely in jest, by a Philosophy tutor back when I was a young Celyn.)
My library had the camera dealy too. Late 70s up until every book got a bar code and the librarians got light pen bar code readers around about 1988 or so.
Out of curiosity, was this a particularly small local government area or anything? I ask only because it seems to me that public libraries had, by the mid 1970s, mostly moved on from this Browne issue system to a computerised version. This was driven in part by the mid 1970s re-organisation of local government areas. Due to the need for previously different local council areas to merge, there was a bit of a push for some public services, including public libraries, to address this by introducing a degree of computerisation. The thinking being, I suppose, that there was going to be an almighty bit of changing anyway, so no better time to do it.
There certainly had been previous movement towards a bit of co-operation of libraries as to how best to utilise this new opportunity of computerisation, although this was for the most part (although not entirely) regarding academic libraries. Obviously any amount of university people writing any amount of papers, making any amount of co-operative groups, and producing any amount of acronyms does not always change make. 
However, I do know that in the mid-to-late 1970s, my local library system had switched on to this wonderful magical (creaky, by today’s standards), thing made by Plessey, I think. And I remember my delight that I could legitimately use libraries all over the city. That Plessey thing, was, I think, quite common by late 1970s, and I think Camden in London was the first to use it, although I might very well be corrected on that.
Wow, are you behind the times.
At our library, we put our card in a slot, then lay our stack of books on a mat. It reads the imbedded RFID chips (I assume that is what it is) and prints out a receipt.
Really? Does that mean the call # was typed at least in twice? Once upon check out, and then upon return? And maybe again if a search or hold was put on it? That’s crazy.
I was an expert at searching the stacks for mis-shelved books, if I do say so myself. There’s an art to it.
I made a “docudrama” film about the Doe collection, in which a hapless reporter gets lost in the stacks and stumbles across a clandestine unit of the library that uses “special tactics” to get books from professors who flout the lenience of the system. The unit is called “GRAB”: General Recall of All Books. They wear all black, and sneak around the darkened tiers carrying ropes and grapnels, etc. Their motto: “We take and get what we can.”