Card-catalogue Era Coming To A Close

You Can Look It Up

April 14, 1989|By Eric Zorn.

The dignified old card catalogue of the Skokie Public Library rests in reference purgatory in the basement furnace room, its hundreds of long, little drawers forever closed to the rifflers and researchers who thumbed through them for generations.

The furnace hums in the darkened room. The cabinets look like some cobwebby artifact in a forgotten corner of the Smithsonian: Through much of the 20th Century, people actually had to use these to locate books.

``There was something comfortable and familiar about the card catalogue,`` said library executive director Carolyn Anthony. ``All this nice wood and the cards . . . it had that element of serendipity-when you`d be looking for one thing and the cards would happen to open to something different and you`d say `Oh, that`s interesting.` ``

Earlier this year, Skokie joined the growing list of libraries mothballing or destroying their card catalogues to make room for fast, efficient and enormously powerful computerized reference systems. A single read-only compact disc easily stores the contents of hundreds of thousands of smudged, yellowed cards, disgorging their secrets in seconds.

The big day when the catalogue finally went south proved melancholy.

``Some of the staff had trouble letting go,`` Anthony said. ``We decided not to have a party, there were such misgivings.``

``It was our security blanket, in a way,`` said reference librarian Steve Oserman, who still wanders down to the furnace room from time to time to hook his finger in one of the looped metal handles and pull out a drawer. ``You didn`t have to do a lot of typing and if you didn`t know exactly how to spell something you were still okay.``

The transition was more traumatic at the Deerfield Public Library, where administrative librarian Jack Hicks recently tossed all the old catalogue cards into the garbage.

``It was such a sad occasion,`` he said. ``Such a sad event. We were taking a system perfected over centuries and just dumping it out.``

Baiba Rosenkranz, Deerfield`s head of technical services, refused to assist in the purge. ``I grew up with the card catalogue,`` she said. ``I really just hated to see it go. It was part of my life; all those years of hard work.``

Deerfield`s empty walnut cabinets are now shoved into a large storage closet behind a meeting room, piled with winter-holiday decor and puppet theater props.

``The card catalogue was a pure system,`` said Hicks, sliding a drawer in and out for old time`s sake. ``It wasn`t based on utility or marketability or compatibility. It had an essential charm. It was a human thing on a human scale.``

The computers, of course, are superhuman. North Suburban Library System director Robert McClarren, whose retirement gala Sunday will be the local highlight of National Library Week, said electronic indexing will all but totally replace card catalogues in public libraries within 25 years.

``The card catalogue has always been a massive piece of neatly done furniture in rich woods-mahoganies, quartered oak, then maple and other light woods,`` McClarren said. ``It was one of the constant symbols of the library. But although I am a romanticist, I am also a utilitarian, and I don`t regret its passing. ``

The catalogues, with their curiously sized 2 15/16-inch by 4 15/16-inch cards annotated with such information as ``xii, 222 p.: ill; cm,`` were a turn-of-the-century innovation that replaced printed book catalogues.

The drawers always had a pleasant heft and closed with a hollow tok!

Scorekeeping pencils and scrap paper lay in trays nearby.

``I was able to fool people into thinking I knew the answer to everything,`` said Jack Hicks ruefully. ``They would ask me a question and I would flip through the cards they had just gone through, looking at the bottom for cross-reference numbers. Then I would say `Ah!` and go right to the stacks.``

Steve Oserman at the Skokie Library said the way the computer zeros in tightly on subjects makes it hard for patrons to browse through broader subjects, such as U.S. history, without feeling as though they have asked for a drink of water and had the hose turned on them.

But a card catalogue never told you if a book was on the shelves or not. It was also susceptible to vandalism, and it forced thousands of librarians to suffer the tedious agony of shifting cards around when the drawers got too tight.

Automation and computers began creeping into library systems as early as the 1940s, but only in the last decade has the technology been good enough to squeeze out the cards. In 1984, west suburban McCook started a library and went straight to computers, totally bypassing card catalogues.
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