March 29, 2024
Column

Libraries lose when catalogs fade

Kent Ward’s “Library’s card catalog to sleep with dinosaurs” was great (BDN, July 20-21). If only it were just to sleep, to awake in the future when needed.

This would be a possibility if the card catalog remained frozen in place as of 1996. Nicholson Baker in “Discards,” a 21-page article in the New Yorker, April 4, 1994, recommended doing just that. He explained how throwing out the card file also would destroy the most important, and irreplaceable, contribution to scholarship.

He called the destruction “a national paroxysm of shortsightedness and anti-intellectualism” and quoted a historian who compared this destruction to “the burning of the library at Alexandria.” He discussed in detail the superiority of the card catalog over computers for research, and concluded “the real reason to keep card catalogs is simply that they hold irreplaceable intelligence of the librarian who worked on them.”

When I visited the Bangor Library last summer, I was elated to see the card catalog still in place and hoped that it would remain so. But corresponding with the director, Barbara McDade indicated that everything would be discarded once the cards had been copied into the computers. I was, however, shocked to see in my copy of her latest newsletter, as noted by Mr. Ward, that this summer would see the end.

She had written me early last August, “The good news, from your point of view, is that we will be keeping the card catalog at least another three or four years.” And on Aug. 28, “We are not rushing to get rid of the card catalog – we’ve made no plans for the space, but I do imagine that after the three or four years it takes to get everything into machine readable form, we will decide to move all or some of the cases out of that room.”

In my dreams I saw them all left in place, as of 1996, even if not readily available to everyone.

Or, given the three or four years, perhaps some museum or historical society could take them. With this abrupt change, such dreams become nightmares.

When Harvard’s Widener Library turned over hundreds of thousands of cards to an artist, Harvard, aware of their worth, kept the cabinets. The Bangor Public Library will advertise theirs in the Bangor Daily News this summer. It will be sad to see a price placed on what many of us see as priceless.

Byrna Porter Weir is a resident of Rochester, N.Y.


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