Card catalogs feel very old but are shockingly new. Merchants stored
letters and slips of paper on wire or thread in the Renaissance. (Our
word “file” comes from filum, or wire.) But a whole technology,
based on scientific principles, for storing, retrieving, and
circulating an infinitely extensible batch of documents? That is some
modern-ass shit. And it helped create the world we all live in.
I could recite the history of the idea and of the furniture, French
bibliographic codes, Melvil Dewey, the standardization of index cards,
how vertical filing propagated from railroads into offices and from
there into the university. It’s on Wikipedia. Instead, let’s talk about the card catalog as a concept.
Before loose-leaf cataloging, books would be cataloged in other
books. (Most other documents were never cataloged at all.) This meant
they’d be recorded chronologically, sometimes alphabetically, or
according to some other scheme, with ad hoc additions and substitutions
sprouting off like epicycles on Ptolemaic circles. It was a big damn
deal to even find a book.
Manuscripts on parchment — the universe of The Name of the Rose
— you could almost keep up with that pace. Printed books on rag paper?
It gets a lot harder. And steam-powered fast-press books on wood-pulp
paper? Even setting aside newspapers, pamphlets, telegraphed letters and
memoranda? You can’t keep track of any of that without a system.
Card catalogs imagine an endlessly growing collection of books and
other documents. It imagines institutions capable of standardizing the
treatment of those documents. And it imagines a democratic public,
scholars, students, and amateurs with both the urge and the ability to
seek out such materials. The card catalog is everything that is the best
of the 19th and 20th centuries. And they look beautiful, and smell
fantastic.
In Control Through Communication,
her study of 19th century information management, JoAnne Yates
identifies five breakthrough technologies. There’s the telephone and
telegraph, which handle external communication. For internal
communication, the big three are the typewriter, carbon paper (and other
duplication technologies), and filing systems, especially the vertical
file and card catalog .... [mehr] https://kottke.org/17/10/card-catalogs-and-the-secret-history-of-modernity
via https://www.univie.ac.at/voeb/blog/?p=47905
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