Revisiting the Card Catalog (The End)

Thelastcard, originally uploaded by UofSC Libraries.

I took a stroll down memory lane and revisited this old blog. I realized how much I missed it, and I enjoyed rereading the information I gathered when searching for "photos of cataloging." There is still a lack visual resources about cataloging on the Internet for teaching. So it's time to revive the Quaquaversal Cataloger.

What better way to do it that going back to the iconic roots of cataloging, the card catalog? The University of South Carolina Library has spent all of 2010 in activities to commemorate the decommissioning of their card catalog, which includes many of the usual "card catalog art" competitions that have occurred elsewhere. The results of these competitions are in their flickr collections.

The best part of the event from a catalog aficionado's perspective is the "card of the day" images, the last card being shown here. But there are too many wonderful bibliographic gems to show individually--all 150 selections are worth a peek, from MONKEYS--SOCIAL ASPECTS--FRANCE, to the one scribbled "temporary card" and dated 12/23/86, or I will be a lady (36th ed.). [et al.].

The "What Can You Make With Catalog Cards?" contest has many intriguing entries, including these catalog card playing cards.

DDC Editorial Policy Committee

Editorial Policy Committee IMG_9744, originally uploaded by OZinOH.

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The people behind the numbers.
OZinOH, an Australian librarian "working in central Ohio," who just happens to have a collection of old DDC editions took this photo of the seldom-seen-as-a-group DDC Editorial Policy Committee. His list of the people in it:

Standing from left to right: Lyn McKinney (Billings Senior High School, MT), Sandra Singh (Vancouver Public Library, BC), David Farris (Library and Archives Canada), Welna van Eeden (University of South Africa), Andrea Kappler (Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library, IN) and EPC Chair Caroline Kent (British Library). Seated from left to right: Arlene Taylor (University of Pittsburgh SIS, retired), Vice Chair Anne Robertson (Australian Committee on Cataloguing), and Deborah Rose-Lefmann (Northwestern University).

Sounds of the Future Catalog

I became weary blogging about cabinetry and decided to go foraging for some good cataloging audio. I was refreshed to find a lot of new offerings available.

Simmons College GSLIScast featured several "Next Generation Catalogs" presentations recorded at the Five College DEDCC conference last November at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Anne M. Prestamo's presentation on the implementation of AquaBrowser at Oklahoma State University caught my eye because I've never liked any implementation of AquaBrowser and was surprised that any university would use it. Her presentation is valuable because she discusses why Oklahoma State chose AquaBrowser over the more talked-about Endeca. She also describes the implementation process--how they worked with MediaLab in Amsterdam to coordinate Aquabrowser with their Voyager database and contracted with Syndetic Solutions for record enhancement. The result of the process was Big Orange Search System. By the end of her program I was amazed by the different features they intend to pack in under the hood of Aquabrowser. She concludes that the future of catalogs is one of "continuous beta."

I have to say that Aquabrowser in this implementation is rather elegant. As Prestamo asserts, the added tables of contents from Syndetic (searchable, unlike common public library implementations) do add value to the retrieval. I chose some keywords from an analytic "irrigation effects global warming," and the results that came up in searching for those words did allow discovery of a number of additional books that would not have been found with a conventional subject search. The retrieval set had over twenty different LCSH subjects with almost no overlap. As with Endeca, the ability to limit searches by many other facets is very easy to understand and use. I'm still not convinced of the value of the "word cloud" for moving to different, tenously related words.

Note: supplementary links for Prestamo's presentation are found at the GSLIScast web site, and the bare audio of the presentation (no links to supplementary materials) is also found through the Internet Archive.

Shelflist Conversion - July 1971

Shelflist Conversion - July 1971, originally uploaded by Queen's University Library.

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Someone at the Queen's University Library, Kingston, Ontario, has scanned lots of old slides of cataloging in the 60s and 70s. The caption says "Using IBM 2741 Terminals - apparently the latest technology everyone wanted." You have to love the details of working spaces in the early seventies. Check out the name plates for "Miss S. Long" and "Miss M. Amey," along with Miss Amey's fine white purse. And a workspace with with working windows--who has that natural environment today?

Actually, I had to look up "shelflist conversion" to figure out what that meant in 1971, just years after OCLC got started and with no realistic options for an online catalog. What libraries tried to do with the new computer technology was to generate more effective print tools and to automate circulation. Wikipedia's entry explains how the terminals seen here were souped up Selectric typewriters with a half-duplex, hard-wired connection to a mainframe. While changing a Selectric ball could produce all kinds of alphabets and fonts in normal typing--from German diacritics to devanagari script, the computer terminal could only deal with the basic alphabetic typewriter characters that were generated when the Selectric ball moved into position to type the letters and symbols. The 2741 may have been desirable hardware back then, but it was not a smooth leap from the Selectric to the computer age.

"Shelflist conversion" is an older cousin of "retrospective conversion" and sometimes used as a synonym. To us now, "recon" usually means downloading copy or creating full MARC records for things not already in the shared database. In the pre-OCLC days, it meant retyping stuff. The ability of a library to manually retype information from the shelflist was limited, fields were fixed-length, and so the output would include brief information like call number, title, and main entry. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, you would find huge 11 x 17 binders with shelflist line entries that were printed on fan-fold paper from such keyed information lying about the library, or the same information on (shudder) microfiche. This data stored on tape was the kind of thing loaded into the first rudimentary online catalogs, such as Illinois' LCS. It still isn't clear to me what Queen's University actually did with these terminals, because their historical account only mentions an OCR circulation project that generated Hollerith cards. So, what Miss M. Amey and Miss S. Long were typing on these particular machines is shrouded in the mists of time. What does become clear, however, is how awful and clunky these early computerization efforts were, and how they sidelined discussions about what a catalog might do. The goal became mass, brute force processing of characters for inventory control.

Serials Strips

Before Online Catalogs, originally uploaded by meliroo.

Copyright by meliroo

I'd almost forgotten about these until I saw this photo. They go back to an unimaginable time when serials really weren't always cataloged. If you needed a volume of a journal that you discovered in some index, you wouldn't go to the catalog to find it. You would walk over to the serials department and consult this carousel to find the call number. The ancient device here is still sitting in the science library at Yale, with a small notice (ca. 1980something) to consult the online catalog for current information. It's a beautifully detailed photo of those little strips--notice the wear on the "S" tab.

I didn't know anything about how these worked, or even what they were called, so I asked the SERIALST members if they had experience with using the strips and how they worked. From them I got some keywords: Kardex, linedex, stripdex and the like. That sent me off on an interesting historical search, cavorting through Google, Library Literature, and patents.

Technically this device is a kind of "visible index" that was part of various commercially-produced filing systems used by both libraries and businesses. Tyler Goldberg and Neal Nixon, writing in Serials Review, explain that visible files like these became the choice for serials management starting in the 1930s after experimentation with vertical files (cards held upright like in a card catalog) proved them to be unwieldy. While a number of companies produced visible index products, the generic name became "Kardex" after the name of the dominant Remington-Rand system patented by J.H. Rand, Jr. in 1920. Strictly speaking, a serials Kardex is a fire-resistant metal cabinet with shallow drawers where 5" by 8" check-in cards lie flat and overlapping, revealing a small edge of each with the title on it. The cards can be flipped up to check off received issues. If you want to know how to use a Kardex system for serials, a detailed manual is preserved as ERIC document 60887 on microfiche.

The photo shows a visible index that's called "linedex," "flexoline," "line-o-dex" or a "stripdex." It may have been a common companion to the Kardex, but it has a different technical genealogy. There are several articles in Library Literature about using these in libraries during the 60s and 70s.

A romp through the U.S. Patent Office database shows fierce competition in the 1920s to develop the perfect visible index system. The first patent of the "line index" type (no. 1,731,543) was issued to William A. Ringler of Globe-Wernicke Company in 1929. Frank D. Powell filed several patents on behalf of the Acme Card System Company, and it is his 1930 patent (no. 1,809,066) that begins to look like the "linedex" in the picture. It even has a mounting post so it can hang in a rack or carousel. Unlike the Kardex type files, this doesn't allow "flipping up." It is a solid frame that allows you to move the strips up and down to insert new pieces or change the order.
So, there you have it. Archaic serials technology from 1929!

I won't spend any more time trying to find out about where the little strips came from, whether they were patented, etc. etc. Serialists report to me that the little cardboard strips came in/on sheets and were fed through the typewriter that way, then inserted through slits in the side or popped in through the front. And other librarians say how annoying they were, especially when someone knocked the stand over.

CITED: Goldberg, Tyler, and Neal Nixon, "Serials Control: Past, Present and Future Imperfect," Serials Review 31, no. 3 (2005): 207.

OPAC at the International School of Tianjin

grade 1, originally uploaded by istlibrary.

Copyright by istlibrary

Here we have adorable first graders eagerly looking for books about the human body in their school library catalog. This photo and its accompanying text were a welcome sight in a wasteland of photos featuring unused, blank-screened OPAC monitors.

The librarian at the International School of Tianjin includes some explanation of what the children were doing. Basically, the task was to drill down a hierarchy within the visual catalog to find a set of resources that had been gathered for this assignment. S/he also gives a link to the online catalog with instructions on how to redo the search: when you get into the catalog, you should click on the "Visual" tab, then choose the PYP UOI icon, then the Grade 1 icon, and finally the Human Body. The Human Body booklist is a bibliography of things in the library. Actually, since this photo was uploaded only a few weeks ago, quite a few of the items in the bibliography are still checked out by the first graders!

I was pleased to discover this installation of a Follett catalog with the visual module. It's hard to find Follett installations on the web, because the small libraries who use Follett usually don't have the resources to run them online. It also is heartening to see that the icons are customized for the library's users, at least in the curriculum-connected section. There are some links to events web sites in Beijing and Tianjin (which seem more appropriate for teachers and other adults), but the History section seems out of the box, with only "Pioneer tales" and "Native Americans." But perhaps that's in line with the curriculum at IST. As I've said elsewhere, it's always refreshing to see libraries thoughtfully developing their iconographic structures.

Classification in Action

English Literature Schedule, originally uploaded by ex_libris_gul.

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This photo is part of a fascinating series of pictures that chronicle bibliographic services at Glasgow University Library, so it's worth clicking over to ex_libris_gul to see the rest. Most interesting to me was the subgroup showing all the different classification tools the catalogers use there. Students sometimes ask me what classifications European libraries use, and my usual answer is that the exclusive DDC or LC standards aren't as strong.

At the University of Glasgow the non-standardization is mind-boggling. They use not only a customized form of Library of Congress Classification, but also Dewey Decimal Classification, the American Mathematical Society scheme, and their own unique system (GUL classification). From what I can see in these books, the GUL classification looks alphanumeric, but it's hard to get an overview of how it works.

Here's an example from a classification browse in the library's Eleanor catalogue:

An 1816 edition of Martin Luther's works in German has the following call number

Bo9-e.5-5 (superscript 3)

The superscript seems to mean "volume 3" in the set.

The GUL scheme goes back so far in history that it's pre-modern. Its 1691 Catalogue uses a classification that seems to match the "BO" Philologi class of the German theology book above.

I was frustrated in trying to find more about the details of their classifications. If you look carefully at the classification guide in the photo, it seems to be a heavily annotated LCC PR schedule, where books by and about William Wordsworth are classified in "550-598," which seems to correspond to MW550-598 the GUL notation.

Though you can't read the details, the photo of the GUL science classification notebooks is very interesting, because it shows decades of maintenance work that was needed to keep this special scheme up-to-date.