What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog | Hacker News Reader

What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog

washingtonpost.com

62 pointsdiodorus108 comments

I remember card catalogs. Modern electronic search is far superior. If searching the card catalog at the public library is "truly democratic," so is searching an electronic index at the public library. You can even perform full-text searches for words that the card-preparer might not have noted -- a huge advantage when researching niche topics that don't get their own books.

https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Advanced

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced

Like you, I look askance at the author's assertion that the card catalog is "truly democratic". Lindgren writes

  > A national card catalogue system was the original “search
  > engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service
  > providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly
  > democratic.

failing to explain that in order to access that card catalog, patrons would have had to travel from their homes all the way to Washington DC.

For someone living in rural Wyoming, Ohio, or even Southeast Virginia, the offline card catalog was hardly "more democratic" than a computer in a public library.

EDIT: Readability.

> failing to explain that in order to access that card catalog, patrons would have had to travel from their homes all the way to Washington DC.

This is not strictly true: the Library of Congress sold copies which were widely used by libraries around the country in the pre-electronic era:

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0112/cds.html

> By the 1960s, CDS had become the Library's largest division, with a staff of some 600 people who shipped more than 78 million cataloging cards each year. This operation occupied floor space larger than a football field "including the end zones," said Ms. Mendenhall. "It was a monster that gave way to the miracle of MARC."

The Card Catalog in my opinion had one benefit - Discoverability.

In the libraries I grew up using, often the books had library bindings with no dust jacket. There was very little discoverability when you wanted to find something to read.. to explore. The card catalog filled that, and was all in one place, so I could sit there and thumb thru the cards and maybe find a couple-three books to go thumb thru to find something that looked interesting.

Yes, for research and for targeted searched of knowledge the electronic search is far superior - but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.

How is a card catalogue better than Amazon or Goodreads, for discoverability?

Well, at least you can be sure that it doesn't put you in an information bubble.

You can't be sure that your local library is free of regional or national bias. Sure, you might have a wider bubble by browsing cards randomly, than browsing recommendations on Amazon. But you could equally well browse Amazon somewhat randomly (e.g. by repeatedly clicking the least attractive book from the recommendation section).

>but for the discovery of things you don't know anything about yet, its a poor substitute.

You're describing getting a random selection from a section, something computers are excellent at. Or you're talking about browsing things as a list, something else computers excel at.

The biggest difference on doing this on a computer is a loss of a sort of grime based review system. Something that could be seen as a benefit or detriment in different circumstances.

The big difference is potentially access to the "raw data" without being limited to the view someone has decided to grant access to. E.g many library search systems I've used would have been able to offer this kind of view of the data, but didn't. Then again others have offered far better views.

But I'd rather replace those bad systems with better ones than go back to a card catalog.

When I was in college, my school was disposing of their card catalog by providing the cards as scratch paper for catalog numbers -- next to the computer terminals that had replaced them. I spirited dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out. I was particularly happy to have preserved some of the cards for the Asian languages collection, which had -- due, I presume, to the limitations of typewriters -- been written by hand.

I have them boxed up somewhere. They're not very interesting, all said, but I could certainly digitize them. I can't decide if that would be an insult or an enshrinement.

I think that would be entirely appropriate. A major goal of modern library science is to digitize rare and crumbling old books for the benefit of all patrons, present and future. I'm glad we switched to digital catalogs, but using the new methods to enshrine their own foundational technology seems deeply poetic.

The archive.org guys might be interested in something like that.

Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while. When it's new, it's scary and bad. I look forward to being 90 and reading about people wistfully remembering the simpler and more cultured bygone days of smartphones and Facebook.

While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile)

I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for - it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click regardless of purchase)

That's a good point. Though there's no reason a computerized system couldn't do that, most of them just don't. Also I don't think electronic catalogs replace human recommendations, just the card system.

With a card catalog, the fact that the system does not do that is obvious to the user.

I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but with little advance conception of what. I bought Godel, Escher, Bach with no awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.

A huge advantage of libraries in general is that they are a curated collection of books on every topic. Typically the quality you get on any topic will be higher than the average new book.

Sometimes you can just walk through the library looking for something to read.

The big win from ai won't be self driving cars, it will be scaleable curation. Google search was amazing, but it's kind of fast food information. Getting high quality information and the halo of related concepts, like you find in a cool library will be another information revolution. Current search raises the lower bound, future search raises the upper bound.

The inverse of course is to remember that new technology is hot, cutting edge, and cool... thus good! Old technology is just tech that has managed to solve problems for years, survived many users, grown through numerous changes in application and expectation, and has an established base of understanding and knowledge both within its very implementation as well as those who work with and on it. I look backward on the 40+ years of predictions to the ends of paper, internal combustion, hydrocarbon fuels, and general ignorance since I've been reading and chuckle remembering the hubris of those who were certain the hot new thing would clearly displace older technology simply because something was new.

>Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while.

The funny thing about that is Facebook was good when it was new and has been getting steadily worse.

> Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while. When it's new, it's scary and bad.

I'm not sure it's that simple. On the subject of libraries in particular, Z39.50 is thirty years old now, and it's still scary and bad.

This is so true.

On HN a few months ago I came across someone claiming that web search was fine before Google and the only reason Google got popular was superior marketing.

I found that so completely shocking to me that someone didn't remember how bad it was. Then I realised that was nearly 20 years ago, and it was really only 7 years or so when search was bad.

I'd never felt so old before.

I can't be the only person to remember using search aggregators (aka "meta search engines") because every individual search engine was so bad and incomplete on its own, especially outside the US.

The "major" search engines before Google were Yahoo and Altavista, who were too busy trying to sell you a foggy concept of being "the Internet's start page" to be of any practical use when you actually wanted to find something specific. And of course plenty of people were stuck in their own ridiculous AOL microcosm.

Not only were the search engines lackluster and incomplete, the search results were also simply not very relevant. Often you'd only get good results because there simply wasn't enough content indexed for your queries to be in any way ambiguous but good luck if you were looking for anything you couldn't pin down to one or two very explicit search terms.

Kids these days don't know how good they have it with their Googles and their smartpads.

Oh yeah, before Google came along I used Metacrawler, which would search about 8 search engines and compiled the results. It was a big improvement over Webcrawler, which I had used previously. Searching was really bad back then compared to now. I remember having to wade through lots of irrelevant search results to find what I wanted.

The moment I discovered Google in early 2000, I dumped Metacrawler and never went back.

I remember using Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Excite, DogPile, and a few others. I also used some meta search engines but I can't remember them.

But I do remember using Copernic.It was a meta search engine application. You had to install this one.

To a lot of us there was a period where it felt like Google was inferior because while it was good, if you understood your space and knew which terms to carefully include/exclude in the search using search operators with Altavista for example, you'd be likely to get a better result. For a while.

But that was based on a web where the amount of information was "small" and of searching within small bubbles we knew well, and spending a lot of time refining searches.

What "made" Google was first making search "good enough" that casual searches would return good results without spending time tuning inclusion/exclusion or figuring out which terms were used for a given subject first. Suddenly search "worked" for a lot of people and instances where it didn't work before, and for a rapidly growing internet population that made figuring out how to make an engine like Altavista work totally pointless.

Altavista was "better" once you had a hyperspecialised set of skills around using Altavista. But that too only lasted until Google had improved their algorithms a bit more combined with people starting to pay attention to SEO. Out went the last niches where the old-style engines could compete.

I used altavista from when it was altavista.digital.com. The only time I remember it being better than Google was when Google only spidered the Stanford domain, and slightly later if you knew the page title you were looking for.

Also if you wanted Usenet search before DejaNews.

Note that I didn't write that it was better in general. It was briefly better for the subset of users that knew exactly what to search for in their specific niches, until e.g. people got used to SEO and the like.

If you knew from past experience and searches that most people used term X when they wrote about Y, Altavista gave you more precise tools to narrow your search.

The whole point being that a subset of users were blinded by our in depth experience with Altavista into not seeing the advantages of Google as early on - we knew exactly how to work around the limitations.

The problem for Altavista, and advantage for Google, is that this doesn't scale. It takes a lot of effort to expand this to learning how to search in any new subject, and that effort grows dramatically as the amount of indexed pages increases and it becomes harder to find terms that act as good filters. It was only viable for a short period of time when the web was small and most people didn't think about SEO, and as long as we were still conditioned to treat a search engine as something you used for things you couldn't e.g. find in a directory.

Well, karma be damned.

Libraries would be the _one_ chance that humanity would have to reboot from a dark age.

Imagine the power went out. For a month. Or a year. E.g. we are very vulnerable to a massive solar flare like the Carrington event in 1859 (http://gizmodo.com/what-would-happen-if-a-massive-solar-stor...), which could knock out power for months or years at a time.

We'd need a way to maintain society without organized computer networks, at least in those areas. Given how interdependent we are, one really wonders if society itself would not collapse.

I know, it's crazy. But imagine you woke up to a world without any computers or computer networks. Maybe that world is 1 year after such an event, or 20. How would you reboot society, or the very least, find and learn what you needed to learn? The answer would be a _library_.

Books will survive. At least, until we digitize and upload all of them, then throw them away.

Apparently we have already thrown away the paper copy of the index. This is extremely dangerous.

To be honest, I'm more worried about the lack of education we have these days. We seem to take for granted that a certain level of knowledge is unnecessary these days -- because we can just let the factories deal with it. How many people know how to make preserves? How many know how to make beer? How many know how to grow vegetables? How many know how to fillet a fish? It's just basic information that used to be common knowledge in every household -- it's already lost to the majority now. Of course we can relearn it from books, but I often think that together with this explosion of access to knowledge, we're already in a bit of a dark age. I suppose the cause is that most are uninterested. Even me, if I'm honest ;-)

In any scenario where society or technology breaks down enough for these skills to be useful, the majority of the population still won't miss them. Without industrialised fishing and farming (which relies on oil and huge production chains) we don't have nearly enough fish for people to filet or grain for people to make bread (let alone beer). And statically speaking you will be starved before your vegetables are grown.

I agree that throwing away the physical books would be stupid, but the index is ready enough to rebuild if we ever need it again. And in a post-computer world search times in the order of days or even weeks would be acceptable: when looking up crop rotations a few days more or less won't make or break your harvest

Rebuilding the index might require actually reading all the books over again. The whole point of an index is that it is 1000x smaller, so it makes absolutely no sense to throw away a paper copy of it.

You know the fun thing about computers and digitization? You can write software to export its data in a way that can be reprinted onto physical paper. I'm not sure if libraries do that, and I'm sure they wouldn't reprint each and every line on separate cards and store them in massive tombs still, but in theory they could have a hardcopy in a few massive binders somewhere. Of course it'll be out of date the instant it's printed, but that's true of old card catalogs too.

You're right. I hope they've done this and that it is kept on site somewhere.

First comment on the article is extremely relevant:

> It's almost always non-working-librarians who evince such passionate nostalgia for antiquated technology such as card catalogs, just as I'm sure it's usually non-working-engineers and non-working-mathematicians who passionately yearn for the days of slide rules and good old pencil and paper, rather than these dang new-fangled computers. (Oh, and yes, just for the record, I do appreciate card catalogs as beautiful and evocative historical artifacts, but nothing more than that. As a working librarian, I would absolutely not want to have to go back to working exclusively with them. Take my word for it, no one in my profession would.)

That matches my experience. I've worked with librarians, and they are invariably excited about the power of computers and the internet. That's because their driving passion is free and easy information access for all, not nostalgia for the texture of the page and the smell of old paper.

Having studied and worked at a Maths department at a University, it isn't only non-working-mathematicians who hate computers. Most of the professors and staff there hated computers, and how it was changing maths.

I don't know why they are, they are increasingly becoming the equivalent to a free net cafe. It's a ridiculously underpaid profession, partly because computers cost so much to maintain and service for them.

There are still too many people who don't have ready internet access. Free internet, and a librarian to help use it, can be vital to a homeless person trying to find work, for example.

> A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that ... was truly democratic.

I don't think I get how a digital library catalogue is less democratic than an analogue one? Is this just a poorly thought out and tossed off claim or is there something I'm missing.

I think the implied point is that somehow telecom business or software design wizards are meddling with what the user sees in digital catalogues, in contrast to the Dewey Decimal, LoC, or other supposedly more neutral topical classification.

It's still a tossed-off claim, and I wouldn't even agree anyway under the best good-faith understanding of what he's trying to say.

Maybe the author never learned that governments and academic institutions still catalog books and offer online search tools for book collections free of advertising or profit motive. The lamentations seem to come from an alternate timeline where Amazon bought all the public libraries and shut them down to push more Kindle sales.

The article isn't very clear on this point, but I think that at this particular juncture, the author isn't so much lamenting "analog versus digital" so much as "public versus private". It's an awkward fit in an article like this.

"Democratic" seems to be one of those words that's lost its meaning. I'm not sure it means much more than "I like this thing" now.

Self-reinforcing productivity differentials.

'The original "search engine"'.

What you're missing is what "search engine" means to the general English-speaking population. Google is a search engine. There's nothing about a digital library catalogue anywhere in that sentence.

The comparison being made is between looking up information in a card catalog in an institution created to serve the public interest, or asking your query of the world's largest advertising company.

Anyone remember taking Library Class?

Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction?

Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)

> difference between fiction and non-fiction

Wait, was that actually part of a curriculum? Surely if you know what "fiction" and "non-" mean you can understand the difference between the two.

Yeah. Not like definition but when and where to find a book

F by name, located in a separate area; NF by number. Etc.

Sample assignment. Diary of Anne Frank. List all areas of the library that have information about the subject (and give name title author(s) etc. And list why you would use that source.

No, that was stuff we just learned as part of general coursework (at secondary level, integrated into the English curriculum) starting in elementary school, not a specific class.

Yes. And this was in 1998. Feels ridiculously irrelevant. Just like my third grade teacher who was adamant that we would only ever be able to write in cursive and in black ink in high school, college, and the workplace, and that to write in manuscript with pencils was not something any respectable adult would do...

I doing some work in a school just a year ago that still taught cursive to their students. I asked why and their response was pretty much just "because that's what you do in third grade." I don't get it.

"[...] These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/

Some educators specializing in dyslexia treatment point to research around cursive handwriting being a helpful tool:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/connecting-dots-role-cur...

You only learn to write cursive in third grade in the US? So you learn to write "print letters" first and then cursive? In Hungary we only learn cursive, and in first grade. As one gets older they generally move towards a mixture of that and print letters, though. Still I find some form of cursive to be much faster to write compared to print letters.

And even though I don't write huge letters and pages of text in handwriting, I do take notes and write scribbles to organize my thought very often. It's not like typing has replaced all use cases of handwriting.

I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and despite crafting a system that was easy to use and intuitive, some of our university library customers still wanted their students to go through training - and produced hard copies of their own user guides to the discovery service, despite us releasing new features every few weeks.

Well, years ago I was implementing the marc21 file format, which is the format used for the paper cards. What's more, when the card systems, in the libraries I was using, had been moved to computers, I could search the cards, and I even had a view which looked exactly like on the paper cards.

So in reality the computers just made the searching faster and parallel.

I've typed catalog cards. I've maintained a card catalog by hand. My memories aren't nearly as fond as the book review author's. An IBM Selectric is at least still somewhat familiar to me.

I haven't been a proper librarian in years. I miss it. We have a reading comprehension problem in the USA as of late. There are not alternative literacies but rather we gave up on the basics. Literacy should be universal yet isn't.

The thing we gained when we digitized a bunch of books is the ability to build new kinds of discovery engines, ones that don't just use the information on the card catalog cards:

https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book...

https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/

The engines we build nowadays are still mostly based on indexed collections of metadata, just as the old card catalogs were. The innovation was in being able to create new kinds of cards, and then compile catalogs of them automatically from the books (or whatever data sources one cared to use). This is a very useful thing to be able to do, but I'm not sure it can really be called a new kind of discovery engine, just a faster one.

The entire point of my discovery project was to NOT just use new kinds of card catalog cards, but to instead do discovery on individual sentences.

I think that new kinds of card catalog cards could also be pretty novel and interesting, for example I'd love to build a histogram of all of the dates seen in a book and include that in the card catalog card.

It's a nifty technique, but I'm not sure it refutes my statement. You still have agents crawling the book to build an index of metadata by (in your experiment's case) subjects and years mentioned. You throw away the entries for subjects and years you're not searching for, because they're not needed for your specific problem, but that's an optimization. If you didn't do that, your agents would assemble what amounts to a fine-grained (and correspondingly large) card catalog of sentences, indexed by subject and year, which you could then search.

Have a look at the latest breed of discovery interfaces that do full text search on their corpus, EDS Discovery, Ex Libris Primo, Serial Solutions Summon. For academic work they are invaluable, letting students and researchers find snippets of related research.

Most of these comments seem to read more into the guy's article than there is. Nowhere did he advocate throwing away digital searches and returning to card catalogues. You can be nostalgic for something old-- especially just the aesthetic, which is mostly the case here-- without demanding it be brought back.

While I agree with the sense I get in general that modern, digital catalogs are better for search than the older, analog catalogs, I feel it has gotten worse for myself, and possibly others like me exist, that were not looking for something specific. I enjoyed the discovery possible by browsing through a card catalog - with lots of information without having to walk and scan through the stacks like I was looking for something specific.

Improvements are always being made, but my memory of the first digital catalogs are that they were highly specific, so other than finding other books by a specifically searched for author, discovery was severely limited. I hated digital catalogs at first. And for many smaller libraries, I find walking through the stacks easier than trying to discover something via the digital catalog.

I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and one of the things I was in charge of was the discovery interface. One of my biggest yardsticks that I measured the success by was how good the system was at serendipity - allowing people to look for nothing in particular if that's what they wanted, and just discover amazing new things they didn't know were on the shelves.

> “tagged” by category owes its existence as an organizing principle to the subject headings delineated by the Library of Congress. A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic.

Democratic my ass. Card catalogs where as bigoted as the people who wrote them. A small subset of the population.

Things on the internet are not tagged, because as a concept it sucks. It has never worked even if Cory and Clay loved them 10 years ago.

This is such a strange article since the nostalgic side that's lost is interesting. The extended skill to use them is interesting (A lost art form) and the bias lost in their writing is interesting too. There is a really interesting article possible here.

I think the problem I have with modern election search is that often presented with what I don't want and I have to craft my query to get a decent list of sources. Mind you, this was way back in 2009 at Wichita State but the experience always seem to come up even when I use Google Scholar or equivalent modern search indices. They always seem to be off in terms of accuracy and relevance on the searches (especially now that I'm getting back into shortwave listening, finding articles on antenna theory is like pulling teeth).

But going back to a card catalog system, you can really only search in ways that someone else has created. You can't search by words within an article, you can't search using regular expressions (or at least some boolean operators), and you can only find things as fast as you can thumb through a stack of cards. At least with a search engine, if I type in a query that isn't going to find me what I'm actually looking for, I can quickly change my query and try again. Also, I'm relying on a librarian to know what I'm asking for. Someone can be very helpful in pointing you towards a stack that contains books about my subject but I will still need to do the work of searching through the books to find relevant ones and then still search through them individually to find the bit on info I need. I'm going to encounter a lot of information I don't care about. With a Google Scholar or University library search engine, I'm going to find the exact keywords I'm looking for and maybe some other related terms that I didn't think of. Search engines can be very helpful but you need to know what you are looking for otherwise you are just going to end up doing the same browsing you would have been doing 30+ years ago.

Not only that, but it's often the way that Librarians are trained to search, but not how the rest of us do.

I don't think my comment implies we ditch digital search indexes. I just think Google as a replacement for properly curated search indexes is the problem here. For general web site searches Google is great but if you're looking for a particular topic it often comes up with sites that aren't even relevant (again my shortwave listening hobby is a great example of this problem). It's pretty hard to work just Google alone when you need a solid base to work from in terms of sites and documents for niche topics. It's why I tend to go back to books for my niche interests. You can't expect Google to handle every possible case because it won't do its primary well.

I saw a two man play at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood years ago called "Defiled" about a librarian played by Jason Alexander dealing with the loss of card catalogs to the computer. There were long soliloquies about niceness of the physicality of the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal classification and what not. I enjoyed the acting but could not empathize at all with the premise of the play or the weeping and gnashing of teeth by the main character.

I think I'll check this book out. Taxonomy is still a hard problem in terms of digital information theory, so I'm interested in how it was managed in a system in which storage was scalability had much harder physical limits.

If that interests you, read more about S.R. Ranganathan, who introduced faceted classification and Otlet's work with Mundaneum and the Universal Decimal Classification. 100 years ago it was possible to search ~10 million records.

Thanks for the tip! Looking at the "Card Catalog" book on Amazon [0], I see it seems to be more of a photo book more suited for coffee table reading.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NARMY8O/

One of the first jobs I had out of school was transcribing hand-written catalog records for a then-new digital catalog. The big worry (this was well before Google, Worldcat, etc. existed) in those days was that much of the bibliographic metadata that had accumulated in the card catalog would be lost, because the effort to digitize it all would be too great. The new digital catalog only had a very simplified version. Over time, of course, the systems improved to the point where I don't think even librarians want to go back to the old way.

This makes me think about lending books during power outages.

Redundancy is actually a good argument for maintaining a library card system along with a digital system. Don't know why the author let that one fly by.

Oh, there are contingency plans for that. They're pretty easy. Writing down barcode numbers and then doing a mass "check out" event on a whole list when power is back covers things.

In an extended event, some backup supplies on-hand from Brodart to handle things Jersey-style with temporary card pockets is easily doable.

Outside of university libraries with real books you have normal libraries. In these libraries the quietest and most devoid of activity area was anywhere near card index things. I am glad their meta data is superceded to some extent. Life moves on rather easily with these media format changes and not much is really lost, except for the likes of this author.

One problem with digital databases: What if the electricity goes out for a very long time? Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database? (Or all librarians' terminals are locked by NotPetya...)

Library without catalog is, while not totally worthless, much more difficult to use.

The physical card catalog, like other paper-based archives, is more resistant to attacks. For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage, like a giant flood or tornado or hit it with explosives.

See: https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/06/27/the-internet-as-existe...

I hope that at least the national libraries and archives will maintain physical backups for the worst-case scenarios.

Samr can happen to physical cards too. Wear and tear, flood, fire, theft, vandalism. Also, its difficult to create copies of physical as compared to digital. The upside of digital is also that you can and should have multiple backups, same as any other digital data.

>For it to be destroyed, you need to cause physical damage

However, I'd like to have redundancy. Backups. Library catalogs are quite critical when it comes to using the combined amount of information the humankind has amassed: It's critical infrastructure. We maintain also backups for things like seeds [1].

You would need just an automated machinery to create printout backups once in a while. It does not necessarily have to be exactly the same system as the old catalogs, just enough that something exists and is ready to use after the rare catastrophic failure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

So, you are saying the library should store some solar panels and spare computers somewhere?

Creating electricity to run a computer is not really that difficult.

I do a feel a bit silly about not considering this. (Okay, the feasibility of solar depends on the local climate. But alternative local methods to generate electricity exist.)

It even also provides some form of resilience that I was calling for: assuming there is a backup system, less-electricity dependent functionality could be recreated if it's considered a worthwhile option.

If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about.

If a hacker manages to destroy the database, well it's a good thing backups are cheap these days and it doesn't take a trained IT person to implement them. Even Crashplan or Carbonite, or just periodically copying files to an external drive and then disconnecting it would probably do the job. If libraries have the money for hundreds of pounds of paper cards and the cabinets to store them in, plus labor to maintain all of that, they surely have the money for functional-if-basic backup infrastructure.

I'm all for securing critical infrastructure with analog systems/subsystems, but the only argument I could see for doing so with libraries is if said library is in the developing world where electricity is intermittent.

>If the electricity is out for a very long time I imagine that's not isolated to the library and people will have much larger problems to worry about.

Well, yes. But a library rendered unusable is also a major problem, in the long run. And especially if it's not just the local library, but all of them in the country?

I would probably need to read the book in question to be able to do Fermi estimates on what kind of amounts of paper and space the old system would need. But if one already has the "this is a backup system for very rare, very worst-case events, not for active use" viewpoint, one is free to do changes and optimizations. For example, miniaturized analogue backup from which the full-blown card system can be reproduced if the need arises.

What do you mean by "in the long run"? Because a library being rendered unusable for a definite length of time wouldn't be a problem in the long run unless we're talking about a system with path dependence. And even if there is some path dependence, it's not quite obvious whether or not that's a major problem. For example, not being able to lend a book during a few hours could be only thing preventing some terminally-ill genius from solving some elusive mathematical problem before he dies, while everyone else can just try to check their books some other day when the power is back on. But so long as the problem can be solved, the solution might be found out later on by someone else.

On the other hand, if libraries are rendered unusable for an indefinite amount of time, or if they become so unreliable that they aren't even worth the effort, those would always be an issue regardless of whether there's path-dependence.

But it sounds somewhat far-fetched to create system to ensure the reliability of libraries in the event of say, a massive solar flare. Plus, it misses the point: in the event of something able to take out something crucial to the entire US library system for any appreciable length of time, the librarians themselves would most likely have far more pressing concerns in their hands. And that would be our new single point of failure.

I pretty much agree with scottLobster. Unless we're talking about developing countries, where electric power is not so much intermitent as unreliable - whereas it might take a hurricane to cause power outages in other countries, a gush of wind here will do - it makes sense to have a system like this in place.

>Plus, it misses the point: in the event of something able to take out something crucial to the entire US library system for any appreciable length of time, the librarians themselves would most likely have far more pressing concerns in their hands. And that would be our new single point of failure.

I'm not exactly sure if I'm following you, but the general idea of this kind of "resilience" is to introduce enough safety / backup measures at all points in the society so that there is less things that hinge on "single point of failure".

The scenario I had in mind was a national grid of a much smaller country going down. (Apparently bringing up all the power plants back online is not as straightforward operation as flipping some switches 'on'.) For example, in conjunction with other crisis (say, conventional war with cyberattack component) that would turn out to taking much longer than anticipated (because aren't they all "over by Christmas"), so there might be an adversary interested in keeping it down.

And the libraries are not the only institutions handling critical data that used to be stored on paper but now exist on computers. The particular solution of retaining backup paper card system might be silly or otherwise prove infeasible at closer inspection, but what kind of backup systems the current institutions have?

edit. Looking at the rest of the comments, smkellat might have provided a splendidly simple answer upthread. At least, concerning libraries.

Frankly you get the cataloger(s) out of their office/cubicle/holding pen, sit the cataloger(s) down at the reference desk, and have them work from memory guiding people through the classification system. You won't have the same level of granularity in searching but by general subject you'll be able to get to where you're looking to go. Been there, done that, wrote the plan while I was Cataloger for a community college in an area at risk for tsunamis. Those call numbers are there for a reason and have very important meanings.

> Or a nefarious hacker manages to destroy the database

offsite backups?

What an incredibly stupid article. The author is supposed to be talking about card catalogues, but then keeps talking about books and libraries. We're not getting rid of those, we're getting rid of card catalogues. Somehow I don't think we should force librarians to keep hand-writing or typing cards for every book, or deprive users of search functions, just for this idiot's BS Wes Anderson aesthetic.

Searching for books using analog cards just has a certain warmth and pleasing aesthetic which digital is tragically missing. - library hipster

You're really missed the point that was being made. It's not a paean to the superiority of card catalogs, but regret for the loss of a time when they delineated the scope of information storage relative to the scope of service provision (the library itself).

Librarians are rarely seen as custodians of knowledge, and their job has been downgraded to mere cataloguing. More troublingly, while the the physicality of a card catalog, and typewritten documents before that, imposed limits and therefore selectivity on what degree of information the government could store about a book (and by extension about you), that limit no longer exists so the amount of information stored has exploded while the amount of service provided has remained the same or even diminished, to the general detriment of society.

That erstwhile necessity to consult or at least cooperate with librarians also fostered a degree of politeness in social relations.

Bigger words don't validate whatever point is being made.

Nothing like the feeling of looking up words in a physical thesaurus. Digital ones don't give you that same sense of inflated intelligence.

Never having used one, I'll take your word for it.

Lo, the scourge of anti-intellectualism reaches HN! Looking through their comment, the only word that one would consider "big" might be "erstwhile". Even if they used big words, why use that to attack them instead of considering what they actually wrote (or taking a second to look them up)? This smug piling on is just toxic. People shouldn't revel in ignorance.

Librarians are custodians of knowledge and dangerous magical artifacts.

...According to TNT.~

Real librarians have become somewhat less prestigious as their previous roles have been automated. They are now little more than administrators of the information service provider of last resort for poor people.

> Real librarians have become somewhat less prestigious as their previous roles have been automated. They are now little more than administrators of the information service provider of last resort for poor people.

One of the reasons we still need librarians is that they understand that "information service provider of last resort for poor people" is a vital and noble service.

I'm having trouble responding to this without being unreasonably rude. It's just so smug and misinformed. Making information available to everyone, regardless of class, status, or wealth, has always been the primary job of public librarians, and computers and the internet give them more ways to do that than ever. It's never been about prestige.

I also feel it is a vital and noble calling. But fewer people share our views now, as compared to 1970. And like it or not, the prestige of a profession strongly affects the number of people who seek to enter it.

Fewer will choose to become professional librarians when municipal library systems employ less with formal training, and task those who have it with serving the prurient interests of transients and homeless people.

Sure, some of those people will also be helped to create electronic resume documents, and to access job boards, and to enroll in online education courses, and to generally make their lives better via access to information, and that is what librarians want out of the job, but they will also be crapped on--both by those who feel entitled to the services they provide, and by those who feel they are obsolete relics.

"A national card catalogue system was the original “search engine” — one that needed no electricity, no service providers or broadband or smartphones, and that was truly democratic."

Oh come on. You needed a building to house it, cases to hold it, people to clean & repair it (physically), and to maintain it. That's plenty of infrastructure. Not to mention, card catalogs require electricity to work, just like electronics. You have to be able to read the cards, and I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards.

And libraries provide local terminals, so service providers, broadband and smartphones aren't required.

As far as "democratic", card catalogs aren't bad -- if you can get to the library during operating hours and are physically able to use one, then you are good to go. But electronically searchable indexes are better. E.g., they allow for remote searching, can support accessibility interfaces, etc.

> I don't think you would have a library for long if people were constantly holding candles close to large sets of cards.

Worked OK for 400 years or so. Newspaper archives, too.

Yeah, this whole article strikes me as one of the "I don't fully understand modern technology so I wistfully recall the predecessor technology that I do understand" variety.

There's a lot of these going around these days, and while it's easy to dismiss them when they try to argue on the merits there is a certain value to them from a design perspective. Old-school analog systems were (to the user) tangible, comprehensible, predictable and repeatable in ways that digital systems often fail to match. You push a button and the device does a thing. You push that button 20 years later, still does the same thing. The response is also tactile and immediate, having a specific feel, sound and smell. Much the same reasons us CS nerds glorify mechanical keyboards.

I think a lot of apps/user facing products could improve from attempting to emulate analog systems more closely. People want a piece of software that they can use for 20 years without being thrown to the ground when the UX does a triple-360 in the next upgrade because someone thought it was "bad design". In the tech world we seem to gravitate towards this relentless, iterative, constantly changing march to perceived glory when perhaps shifting the balance back the other direction could be helpful.

Not just the card catalog but the entire concept of library has been lost. Libraries have been transformed from places where people could come to read, research and explore into community homeless shelters that provide online porn access and bathrooms that are basically shooting galleries.

This isn't true.

Source: I have bothered to set foot in libraries lately.

Where are you that your local library is like this?

I've been to a few public libraries in my state and none of them have been like this. Most of them aren't very busy but they're always clean and usually have a decent selection of books and media. My local library is especially good; they have an entire floor devoted to children's books and I often see families in there picking out books together.

There are news horror stories about a few major metropolitan libraries in crime-ridden areas, and the grandfather poster generalized them to all 10,000+ other public libraries in the country.

That's the only explanation I can think of, anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com