And on-line catalogues, despite their neolithic screen displays and excruciatingly slow retrieval rates, offer many amenities. They do not grow mold, as the card catalogue of the Engineering Library of the University of Toronto once did, following water damage. And they are harder to vandalize. Radical students destroyed roughly a hundred thousand cards from the catalogue at the University of Illinois in the sixties. Berkeley’s library staff was told to keep watch over the university’s card catalogues during the antiwar turmoil there. Someone reportedly poured ink on the Henry Cabot Lodge cards at Stanford. The huge frozen card catalogue of the Library of Congress currently suffers from alarming levels of public trauma: like the movie trope in which the pri vate eye tears a page from a phone book at a public phone rather than bothering to copy down an address and a phone number, library visitors—the heedless, the crazy—have, especially since the late eighties, been increasingly capable of tearing out the card referring to a book they want. Indeed, one of the reasons that the New York Public Library had to close its public catalogue was that the public was destroying it. The Hetty Green cards disappeared. Someone calling himself “Cosmos” was periodically making off with all the cards for “Mein Kampf.” Cards for two Dante manuscripts were stolen: not the manuscripts, the cards for the manuscripts. Card catalogues constitute vandalizable entities because they are expressive of needful social trust and communal achievement, as are other common targets, such as subway cars, railroad bridges, mailboxes, and traffic signs. To the extent that a duster of computer terminals linked to an online catalogue protects a room full of older card cabinets by marginalizing them, they are performing a great service.
A nice long list of card catalog cards being destroyed, damaged, or stolen!
