Now You See It, Now You Don't!
TellZall's object for February is the Card Catalog
Although library card catalog systems still exist today, they do so in a much different form than they did throughout most of the twentieth century. Today, if we wish to find a book in the library, all we have to do is log on to a computer. Many times, it is possible to access the library's catalog even if we are at home! Before the introduction of computer cataloging systems to libraries, if someone wanted to find a book in the library, he or she had to look it up in the card catalog.
So what exactly is a card catalog? It is a record of everything that could be found in the library, including items like books, films, maps, recordings, etc. In a traditional card catalog, it was possible to look up something in a number of different ways. The bibliographic information about each item would be printed on a number of index cards, each categorized in a special way. If the library patrons knew the name of the item they wanted to find, they could look it up under the "Title" category, which would be filed in alphabetical order. If the patron knew the author, he or she could look an item up that way, as another set of cards were filed in alphabetical order by author. A third set of cards allowed library users to find a variety of books and other materials by looking up the subject that they were interested in. Libraries began using card catalogs in the nineteenth century, although other forms of cataloging existed even earlier. [insert image 01]
The card catalog was a much easier way to find what you were looking for instead of roaming up and down the aisles of books at the library, hoping to come across what you wanted, but there were still some significant limitations to this system. It was not possible to do a search by keyword, which is a very popular way to search for information today. In order to find an item by subject, you had to understand the Library of Congress's system for subject headings. Plus, as more and more books are published each year, many libraries found that the card catalogs could not keep up with their holdings. Card catalogs took up a lot of space, so the more books a library had, the bigger the card catalog had to be. Librarians saw computers as a great way to save space in the library, while making it easier for library patrons to find what they were searching for. The online catalogs have also proven to be much less expensive for libraries to maintain. One of the names for the new computer cataloging system is OPAC, or the Online Public Access Catalog.
