I just discovered today that 3" x 5" card catalog cards make great single-use shoe horns.
Had to take my shoes off at work today to put on bandaids - the shoes are new & not yet broken in, so they’re giving me blisters.
At home I use a shoe horn to put these shoes on, because they are stiff & form-fitting (does that make sense).
Anyway, I needed help to get them back on without messing up the bandaids I just put on, so I grabbed one of the shelf-list cards and used it like a shoe horn. It worked like a charm, though the maneuver mangled the card and I had to throw it in the recycle bin.
Anyone upset yet by my abuse of the shelf-list cards?
Don’t be - I actually used one of the start-of-pack cards that OCLC puts in every bunch of cards they send us.
The central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library on 5th and Grand “wallpapered” the elevator cars with old catalog cards. They also made a floor-to-ceiling window in the cars and then lined the elevator shafts with more cards. They whizz past as you travel up and down, and it lends a sense of how enormous and daunting the catalog had been in the days of old. Pretty darn cool!
[silly librarian hijack] Our old card catalog is still being used as scratch paper over a decade later. I use my private reserve to prop up the uneven leg of my desk, and to do origami while I’m waiting for records to overlay one-by-one from OCLC (we still use CatME, and Connexion will be got here soon enough!) [/slh]
I’m too new at my current job to know if there are still card catalog cards around. And, while I understand the basics of cataloging…my focus right now is on reference. But I can provide a haiku for the moment:
Card Catalog cards
Make excellent shoehorns, yes
Please use the fresh ones
All my books on hold come with old cards stuck in them, with my name written on. They’re being used as scrap paper.
I would use them as birth announcements! You could make up an entry for the baby, and type it up on a blank card. Could you get any cooler than that? Heh.
Wallpaper is also good.
I have a little old catalog cabinet; I wish I had another one. They hold audio tapes perfectly. And I love them.
I teach at a university, and the students who know what a card catalog card actually looks like are few and far between these days…
For the vast majority of them, the term “card catalog” simply means an electronic database. The best guess I’ve heard for why it’s called a card catalog is that the data used to be entered on punch cards before it went into the computer.