![]() ![]() ![]() "It was the first book that I saw that featured a young African-American Brownie and I loved it," she recalls.Īnd the card points Hayden to other books. In the basement catalog at the Library of Congress, Hayden pulls out a card for her favorite childhood book - Bright April by Marguerite De Angeli, about a young Girl Scout. "It's like a cabinet of curiosities," she says. Generations of library users remember pulling out the drawers, fingering through the cards, and having those moments of discovery. Spofford got his way, and the library reorganized and expanded that same year.Ĭard catalogs began to be phased out in the 1980s, but Hayden says there's plenty of nostalgia for the perfectly organized drawers of cards. He said that without more space, he would be "presiding over the greatest chaos in America." That distinguished librarian was Ainsworth Rand Spofford - who had his own "idiosyncratic" approach to cataloging. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Frequently, it depended upon the phenomenal memory of the distinguished Librarian."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Card Catalog Subtitle Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures Author Library of Congress and Carla Hayden An Annual Report from 1897 depicted a chaotic state of affairs: "The Library was so congested, books were heaped up in so many crevices and out-of-the-way corners, down in the crypt, hidden in darkness from access of observation, that obtaining a volume, and especially, one out of the range of general reading, was a question of time and patience. Typewritten cards started appearing at the end of the 19th century.Ĭataloging wasn't always neat and tidy - even for the old Congressional Library. Handwritten cards began to be standardized in the 1800s, when New York State Library Director Melvil Dewey and inventor Thomas Edison perfected a handwriting style called "library hand." Its goal was to make the cards read the same no matter the library. Union catalogers at work at the Library of Congress in 1927. Some of the cards are handwritten, others are typed with cross out marks and notes scribbled in the margins. Some highlights from the Library of Congress' collection include cards from Walt Whitman, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (you might know him as Mark Twain), Margaret Mitchell, James Baldwin, William Faulkner. "There's tens of millions of cards here," says Peter Devereaux, author of The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures. There's a huge card catalog in the basement of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. A new book from the Library of Congress celebrates these catalogs as the analog ancestor of the search engine. If you do a Google search for "card catalog" it will likely return Pinterest-worthy images of antique furniture for sale - boxy, wooden cabinets with tiny drawers, great for storing knick-knacks, jewelry or art supplies.īut before these cabinets held household objects, they held countless index cards - which, at the time, were the pathways to knowledge and information. Above, the Library of Congress Card Division, 1919 ![]()
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