Library of Congress

I am old enough to have used a card catalog during the whole of my education. We actually had classes when I was young on how to use the library, the catalog and the microfiche. Even though digital catalogs are easier, more up-to-date and faster, there’s something wonderful about a physical card catalog. It’s the tactile quality of actually discovering something. Reading the tracks left by another person for you to find a book you might love or at least learn something from.

The history show more of the catalog is a reasonably interesting one and fraught with humans fighting over really dumb stuff. The very fact that bound catalogs were de rigeur for so long speaks to this. The instant the thing is bound it is obsolete. The very nature of a growing collection of objects renders it so and while the idea itself of using something small, portable and most of all sortable, isn’t French, the French were the first to exploit the medium. And they did it with playing cards! Suits and all. Fabulous.

Interspersed with the story of the card catalog (and the Dewey decimal system, which if you think about it is brilliant) are photos of actual cards in all their quirky glory. I had no idea that so many were handwritten and in Library Hand no less. Library Hand is a writing style strictly defined as to letter size, shape and even the slant. It’s really beautiful to look at and remarkably easy to read. If you’ve been taught how that is. If you’re a kid these days it might as well be hieroglyphs.

Along with the cards are the books or artifacts that go with them such as a collection of Emily Dickinson poetry with a cover featuring Indian Pipe, my favorite wildflower. And speaking of covers, what’s with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? Now that’s deceptive advertising. I had a little sizzle of personal connection among the treasures of the Library of Congress - they have a folio by Pierre-Joseph Redoute who made the most amazing botanical prints in the 1800s. I have a set of reproductions that I frame and hang on my walls.

Alas I don’t actually have a card catalog - the physical piece of furniture. There are a few scattered among the shelves at one of my local libraries and I so want to buy it or steal it and bring it home. Many of these oak cabinets were sold off in the 1990s as the electronic catalog (and the MARC record, invented by a woman) gained popularity. People often think librarians are staid and stodgy, but they embraced the electronic catalog very quickly because it was more fluid and easier to update and find information.

But there are treasures there in the cards. Funny notes and bits of information that individual catalogers and librarians thought important enough to include. Some cards were actually multiples and extend to a dozen or more! It helped bring the Library of Congress to the people instead of being a private collection for Senators. As a matter of fact, it seems to have been progressive for its time - there’s a photo from the 1940s near the beginning of a bunch of people at a long table doing research and in the crowd is a black man and many women. All learning and discovering together, the way it should be. show less

Well, here's a book that made me feel old. Knowing that most people under the age of 30 have never used a card catalog makes me sad for some reason. It's not the world's most glamorous or sophisticated technology, but this book highlights its charm quite vividly. I was still using card catalogs at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin as recently as 1995, and I remember how thrilling it was to find their provenance catalog and the discoveries that led to. I catalog my own show more library with the online database of LibraryThing, although as a teenager I did build a card catalog to manage my then-growing considerable comic book collection.

This materially-beautiful volume The Card Catalog supplies a fairly full history of the Library of Congress itself (at least for its first century or so), in support of its more particular study of the library's card catalog, and the library's eventual mission to support cataloging at local libraries across the US. As the text explains, the Library of Congress was actually one of the last major collections in the US to adopt the card cataloging system, but when they did so, it transformed library cataloging nationwide.

I was fascinated by trivia such as the French origin of library catalog cards in the repurposing of playing cards, and the features of the "library hand" in which American catalogers were trained for creating cards in manuscript. I was also gratified to find out that the physical card catalog of the Library of Congress, while retired, has been retained. As explained and amply demonstrated in this book, there is valuable information in the cards that did not make it into the MARC records created by a private vendor from the card catalog in the 1980s. The visible emendations to a card show change in the status of a given book (promotion from second to "official" copy, for example), details of changes between editions, and developments in metadata such as the addition of an author's date of death.

There are many full color reproductions from catalogs that preceded the card catalog, and over half of the book consists of pictures of cards from the catalog, accompanied by photos of the actual books (or other media objects) and often portraits of the authors. The fact that The Card Catalog is thus itself a secondary product of the catalogers who worked in the Library of Congress is evidently why writer and editor Peter Devereaux gave the book's byline to the institution itself, crediting on the cover Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden with the foreword, and effacing his own role--showing it only in his subscription to the introduction.

I enjoyed reading this book far more than I expected to. I recommend it to both the curious and the nostalgic, and I'm glad that it exists to help document this increasingly ghostly element of information science. show less

The Card Catalog Is a brief history of, you guessed it, the card catalog.

And yet, it's so much more than that. It's the story of humanity's efforts through the ages to compile, preserve, and organize our own history. Since the dawn of written language, humans have sought to create records of themselves and their doings. Heck, even before written language, we were compelled to leave behind some creative record of ourselves (looking at you, Paleolithic cave paintings). The most interesting show more part, in my opinion, is how little we've changed in that regard. Just look at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, any kind of contemporary platform that provides a means for us to put ourselves out there and tell the world "hey, I'm here, I exist" (which is probably all that those cave paintings were meant to do, basically a thousands of years old selfie). I mean, can we all just take a moment to appreciate how incredible that is? We like to think ourselves so advanced compared to ancient humans, but we seem to have more in common than we realize.

But I digress.

First, a little background. I didn't realize until after I'd finished this book that I had actually requested it from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program some time ago. It's a shame I didn't win it then because I loved it! The design, the content, the subject matter -- this is a book that I want to own eventually.

This is not a comprehensive history by any means. There are only around 50 or so pages of actual text, providing a cursory introduction to the formation and development of modern cataloging systems. The rest of the book consists of photographs of the original cards, the item to which the card refers, and the various facilities and furniture that once housed these catalogs, as well as photos of the individuals who pioneered these methods. I've seen others describe the written portions as dense, dry, or textbook-ish, but I didn't find it to be any of those. To me, it was very thorough and engaging, offering just enough factual narrative without overdoing or underdoing it. It's a perfect introduction to this rather niche topic, whether you're an avid library fanatic like I am, or a curious casual just looking to learn something new.

I do have a few criticisms, the first of which is the size of the photos themselves. The example cards are roughly to scale so they are very easy to read, but we only ever get to see one side and they often refer to a continuation on the reverse side of the card. They're also centered on the page surrounded by empty space, so there would have been plenty of room to show both sides.
I was most disappointed at how tiny the photos of the actual items were, sometimes only an inch or two tall (as with the examples from the Audobon Birds of America, which is stunningly illustrated). Granted, if the book were any larger, it would be much thinner, but it was hard to appreciate the rare beauty and quality of these books when I can barely make out the details. I was also a bit disappointed by the lack of explanation with the majority of items selected, beyond the title and creator. Some were obvious classics (like first editions of Ulysses or Moby Dick) or simply lovely as a physical object (I NEED that copy of Sleepy Hollow in my life), but there's no narrative to any of these selections -- they seem to have been chosen at random and some, while interesting, are fairly obscure. Sure, I can look them up online to learn more, but I would have preferred having some more details within the book itself, just a few lines about why that particular item is being showcased.

As a physical object, this book was a delight. In lieu of a dustjacket, it sports a striking belly band reproducing the original card for Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Inside the cover is a pocket with removable due date card. Each chapter begins with a title page featuring some kind of Library of Congress-related art or photograph, with the title inside a catalog card-shaped text box. And throughout the book are numerous other spreads of art, photos, card/document reproductions, all very tastefully and lavishly arranged. In short, this book was simply fun to explore. I think it would make a wonderful coffee table book or display piece for a guest to flip through to pass some time.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and I think it's a perfect starting point for anyone who might be interested in learning more about this or any other aspect of library history. Both the length and the formatting make the subject widely accessible and engaging. If you're looking for a more in-depth treatment, however, this will probably not be useful. It's clearly not written with historians or any kind of scholarship in mind.

A favorite quote:
The card catalog lives on as both a nostalgic relic that continues to elicit positive feelings about libraries and books and as a vital resource to researchers and catalogers at the Library of Congress. [...]
In the Library of Congress Main Reading Room the surviving rows of drawers stand as a tangible vestige of how important the collections are,
but also as a reminder that change is both imminent and inescapable.

(Library of Congress, The Card Catalog) show less

It all started as a map: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-p... - Joy Harjo decited to map the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems. There was one condition - they had to be still living, showing the modern state of the art (one of the authors died while the project was in progress). The result was a selection of 47 poets, covering the map (including Alaska and all the Pacific islands (including Guam)) and showing the diversity of the genre. show more The map was built based on where a poet wanted to be shown - where their tribe is, where their tribe used to be or where the poet feels at home. Then the 47 poets recorded their poems, added commentary (available to listen to or as a transcript) about the poem, their connection to poetry and a lot more things in between and someone added short biographies. And the online project was complete.

Then came the anthology - the book that actually made me realize that this project existed. It reprints the 47 poems - and the biographies - bu leaves out the commentaries. And unlike a map where you can pick your own order through it, a book had to order the poems somehow. A few of the poems are bilingual, a few are in English but they are using so many native words that you need internet to figure out what happens if you do not speak the language (a couple of poems have translations in footnotes, most don't). The order appears to be geographical on the surface but if you read the introduction, you will realize that the map directions are used as a base for a topic - beginning and endings - and if you are still not sure, a Hawaiian poem in the middle section drives that home.

The poems are steeped into the cultures they are coming from - some of them retell legends, some of them talk about the reality of their people now; some go back in time into history, some seem to look forward. Coming from different cultures, they are discordant and different - there is no overall tradition that ties them together as happens with most anthologies - except for Earth, suffering and hope.

I did not like every single poem, I did not understand quite a few of them (for some the commentaries helped, for others, even that did not help much). Most are modern (with all the mess that comes from modern poetry) although there are a few traditional styles. A few of them sound like chants, a few are almost crossing into prose. Some are a few lines long, some are 18 pages (ok... only one is 18 pages). Some use the page to almost draw a picture with the positioning of the words, others allow the words to talk for themselves.

But what all of them end up is creating pictures and make you think and feel. And that's what good poetry does.

Even if the whole project was just this anthology, I would still have liked it. Add the online portions and it becomes a lot more. show less