The end of an era. Today I saw the demise of the card catalog in my library. Hundreds of thousands of records and entire careers were dumped in a matter of minutes.
Football players working on campus this summer made moving the cabinets easy work.
Off to auction. Going, going, gone.
A bittersweet day for this librarian who began her career by learning the fine points of filing cards in the catalog--main entry, shelf list, added entry, alphabetical order. My first library jobs included an hour of filing every morning and then "pulling" cards as needed for lost or discarded titles.
Of course we have not used the paper card catalog in years, librarians are ultra techno savvy, but in this particular library the job of pitching the catalog has just been too daunting (both physically and emotionally) until today.
The space freed up by taking away the catalog will be used for, you got it, more computers, expansion of the DVD and CD collections.
5 comments:
OK Cheryl, this really takes me back! We said goodbye to our card catalogs back in the early 90s, and believe me, some of the faculty were kicking and screaming. We look for more space to put even more computers every year...
Thanks for the trip down memory lane...Your fellow library geek art quilter, Jen
I have great memories of spending my adolescents in the library flipping through those cards. Our libraries pitched them years ago and although I love looking up via computer, it definitely felt like the dawn of a new era.
I find it so much easier to look it up now, but I always found looking through card catalogues kind of fun. I remember being taught how to in elementary school. Wow. Technology marches on.
Awww Cheryl, that is sad in a nostalgic, memory heavy kinda way. I'm thinking those drawers would be cool to have for storing stuff at home. I wonder who ended up buying them and how they'll use them?
I too wonder what happened/is to happen to those fabulous old fashioned card holding drawers...wish I could get my hands on some...
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