Typewriter Ribbon varieties Offered by Underwood in 1956<br /> https://munk.org/typecast/2020/08/23/typewriter-ribbon-varieties-offered-by-underwood-in-1956/

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/side-profile-of-traditional-wooden-library-card-royalty-free-image/1374216041?searchscope=image%2Cfilm

Another fun photo of "linked" strings wrapped around a library card catalog representing the links between ideas within a paper database.

Macey Filing Appliances 1906<br /> Catalogue No. 4206<br /> The Macey Co.<br /> https://archive.org/details/macey-filing-appliances-1906/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/catalog00fred/mode/2up

Fred Macey Company Catalog (1910)

1968 – Smith-Corona SCM Typewriter Typestyles and Keyboards by [[Theodore Munk]]

1954 Smith-Corona (SCM) Typewriter Type Styles and Keyboards Catalog – To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth… by [[Theodore Munk]]

https://christmas.musetechnical.com/

Catalogs & Wishbooks from Sears, Montgomery Ward, and JC Penny

Hartlib Papers 30/4/47A, Ephemerides 1640, Part 2.

In extolling the Ark of Studies created by Thomas Harrison, Samuel Hartlib indicated that the combinations of information and the potential links between them created the "argumentative part" of the system. In some sense this seems to be analogous to the the processing power of an information system if not specifically creating its consciousness.

https://www.levenger.com/products/card-catalog-box?variant=43007544066197

A bit on the small side, but has a built in pen holder:

https://www.mccoys-kecatalogs.com/index.htm

When did Gaylord move from the smaller plates to the larger ones with two sections (small square and larger rectangle)?

Not large enough for most index card collections, but you have to love this listing for this photo of a man snuggling up to his card index:

Original photo from their website:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394981087071

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394981109786

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071458213&seq=1

Modern Filing Systems<br /> Wagemaker Furniture Company, Ltd. 1904 furniture catalog

https://alexandrianpl.org/comfort-cabinet/

A library has repurposed their library card catalogs as a comfort cabinet to provide their community with necessities like toothbrushes, combs, band aids, socks, etc.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/354851703411

2 drawer Library Bureau catalog listed for $199, but sold for a lower amount.

Hipster here with respect to the card catalog as furniture without mention of the "hipster PDA".

Krapp, Peter. “Paper Slips: The Long Reign of the Index Card and Card Catalog.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf. Routledge, 2019.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1283073189/founding-member-level-membership-museum

Museum of Tiny Things, a museum of miniatures and scenes built into a repurposed library card catalog.

archive link

Early library card catalogs used cards that were 2 x 5" cards, the Harvard College size, before the standardization of 3 x 5" index cards.

https://www.librarybureausteel.com/index.html

Library Bureau got spun off of Remington Rand and still sells library products in 2023, though primarily shelving units now. It doesn't list any card catalogs as part of its offerings.

The Lost Art of Library Card Catalogues<br /> by Claire Voon

Broadly a synopsis/advertisement for The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (Chronicle, 2017), which I've put on my to read list.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/155447667554

This Catalog has a page with the various sizes of card catalog boxes available from Cole Steel in 1950s. The external sizes can be useful for placing the individual card sizes for some of these boxes on the secondary market.

They also include approximate card capacities.

https://www.universityproducts.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=card%20catalog

In 2023, University Products offered catalog cards for printing, but no longer offers physical card catalogs.

1930s Wilson Memindex Co Index Card Organizer Pre Rolodex Ad Price List Brochure

archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20230310010450/https://www.ebay.com/itm/165910049390

Includes price lists

List of cards includes: - Dated tab cards for a year from any desired. - Blank tab cards for jottings arranged by subject. - These were sold in 1/2 or 1/3 cut formats - Pocket Alphabets for jottings arranged by letter. - Cash Account Cards [without tabs]. - Extra Record Cards for permanent memoranda. - Monthly Guides for quick reference to future dates. - Blank Guides for filing records by subject.. - Alphabet Guides for filing alphabetically.

Memindex sales brochures recommended the 3 x 5" cards (which had apparently been standardized by 1930 compared to the 5 1/2" width from earlier versions around 1906) because they could be used with other 3 x 5" index card systems.

In the 1930s Wilson Memindex Company sold more of their vest pocket sized 2 1/4 x 4 1/2" systems than 3 x 5" systems.

Some of the difference between the vest sized and regular sized systems choice was based on the size of the particular user's handwriting. It was recommended that those with larger handwriting use the larger cards.

By the 1930's at least the Memindex tag line "An Automatic Memory" was being used, which also gave an indication of the ubiquity of automatization of industrialized life.

The Memindex has proved its success in more than one hundred kinds of business. Highly recommended by men in executive positions, merchants, manufacturers, managers, .... etc.

Notice the gendering of users specifically as men here.

Features: - Sunday cards were sold separately and by my reading were full length tabs rather than 1/6 tabs like the other six days of the week - Lids were custom fit to the bases and needed to be ordered together - The Memindex Jr. held 400 cards versus the larger 9 inch standard trays which had space for 800 cards and block (presumably a block to hold them up or at an angle when partially empty).

The Memindex Jr., according to a price sheet in the 1930s, was used "extensively as an advertising gift".

The Memindex system had cards available in bundles of 100 that were labeled with the heading "Things to Keep in Sight".

There's a catalog for this exhibition available:

Meschede, Friedrich, ed. Serendipity. Vom Glück des Findens. Snoeck Verlagsges, 2015. https://www.buecher.de/shop/buecher/serendipity-vom-glueck-des-findens/broschiertes-buch/products_products/detail/prod_id/43762021/.

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/tired-librarian-gm183377577-15073069

Hilarious!

use of "mental card catalogue" as memory

https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History<br /> Exploring the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard's libraries.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/SILNMAHTL_34484

Heyde indicates how "valuable notes and chains of thought are" but also points out "how uncontrollable and irretrievable" they are.

This statement is strong evidence along with others in this chapter which may have inspired Niklas Luhmann to invent his iteration of the zettelkasten method of excerpting and making notes.

(link to: Clemens /Heyde and Luhmann timeline: https://hypothes.is/a/4wxHdDqeEe2OKGMHXDKezA)

Presumably he may have either heard or seen others talking about or using these general methods either during his undergraduate or law school experiences. Even with some scant experience, this line may have struck him significantly as an organization barrier of earlier methods.

Why have notes strewn about in a box or notebook as Heyde says? Why spend the time indexing everything and then needing to search for it later? Why not take the time to actively place new ideas into one's box as close as possibly to ideas they directly relate to?

But how do we manage this in a findable way? Since we can't index ideas based on tabs in a notebook or even notebook page numbers, we need to have some sort of handle on where ideas are in slips within our box. The development of European card catalog systems had started in the late 1700s, and further refinements of Melvil Dewey as well as standardization had come about by the early to mid 1900s. One could have used the Dewey Decimal System to index their notes using smaller decimals to infinitely intersperse cards on a growing basis.

But Niklas Luhmann had gone to law school and spent time in civil administration. He would have been aware of aktenzeichen file numbers used in German law/court settings and public administration. He seems to have used a simplified version of this sort of filing system as the base of his numbering system. And why not? He would have likely been intimately familiar with its use and application, so why not adopt it or a simplified version of it for his use? Because it's extensible in a a branching tree fashion, one can add an infinite number of cards or files into the midst of a preexisting collection. And isn't this just the function aktenzeichen file numbers served within the German court system? Incidentally these file numbers began use around 1932, but were likely heavily influenced by the Austrian conscription numbers and house numbers of the late 1770s which also influenced library card cataloging numbers, so the whole system comes right back around. (Ref Krajewski here).

(Cross reference/ see: https://hypothes.is/a/CqGhGvchEey6heekrEJ9WA

Other pieces he may have been attempting to get around include the excessive work of additional copying involved in this piece as well as a lot of the additional work of indexing.

One will note that Luhmann's index was much more sparse than without his methods. Often in books, a reader will find a reference or two in an index and then go right to the spot they need and read around it. Luhmann did exactly this in his sequence of cards. An index entry or two would send him to the general local and sifting through a handful of cards would place him in the correct vicinity. This results in a slight increase in time for some searches, but it pays off in massive savings of time of not needing to cross index everything onto cards as one goes, and it also dramatically increases the probability that one will serendipitously review over related cards and potentially generate new insights and links for new ideas going into one's slip box.

A bit tongue-in-cheek, the New York Times describes for the technically inadept what a typewriter and a card catalog are.

Note that here in the index, Eco differentiates the index card file with the descriptor "bibliographical" as there is another card file that will play a part.

Fickert, Kevin-Steven. “Die Geschichte des Zettelkatalogs : eine historisch-kritische Betrachtung eines Verzeichnismediums und seiner Regelwerke.” Fachhochschule Stuttgart Hochschule der Medien, 2003. https://hdms.bsz-bw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/141

via Ton Zijlstra

Swiss humanist Conrad Gesner. Gesner's Bibliotheca Universalis, which appeared between 1545 and 1548 in two folio volumes with over 1000 pages each, was supposed to list all the books that had appeared since Gutenberg.

In Bibliotheca Universalis, Conrad Gesner collected a list that was supposed to list all the books which had appeared since Gutenberg's moveable type.

reply to TurnipMonkey

They're not as easy to come by as you might think, though they pop up from time to time. Given shipping costs, you're definitely better off finding something locally if you can.

OCLC started digital shared cataloging in 1971. The peak for pre-printed library catalog cards was in 1985, and they quit printing cards in bulk in 2015 after shipping more than 1.9 billion cards during that time.^[1]

https://collation.folger.edu/2018/12/the-key-to-removing-a-rod/

"OCLC Prints Last Library Catalog Cards.” OCLC, October 1, 2015. 44280170. OCLC News Releases 2015 - US. https://cdm15003.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15003coll6/id/386.

Librarians either handwrote or typed up their own library card catalog cards until the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) began printing cards for libraries as a service.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/115477031627?hash=item1ae2f7aacb:g:yUIAAOSwQp1ix3zT

Another example of someone using a library card catalog as wine storage

Someone was apparently using an old library card catalog to store wine bottles!

While this excerpt doesn't indicate the index card origin of the published book, it does indicate that it has descriptions of more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, detective stories, etc. which includes annotations and critical judgements of each.

One can thus draw the conclusion that this shared index card collection of details was used to publish a subsequent book.

Example :

• Namespace declaration in the feed element (in our example, we use the prefix « pse » ):

xml <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:pse="http://vaemendis.net/opds-pse/ns" xmlns:opds="http://opds-spec.org/2010/catalog" xml:lang="en" xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" >

• Additional link in an entry to allow page by page access to the document :

xml <link rel="http://vaemendis.net/opds-pse/stream" type="image/jpeg" href="/opds-comics/stream/1217?page={pageNumber}&width={maxWidth}" pse:count="35" />

```html <link rel="alternate" type="application/opml+xml" title="Outline" href="https://www.openedition.org/?page=opml" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml;profile=opds-catalog" title="OpenEdition OPDS Catalogue" href="http://opds.openedition.org" /> ```

• Feedbooks : http://fr.feedbooks.com/catalog
• Atramenta : https://www.atramenta.net/opds/
• Gallica : https://gallica.bnf.fr/opds
• Ebooks Gratuits : https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/opds/
• Archive.org : http://bookserver.archive.org/catalog
• Projet Gutenberg : http://m.gutenberg.org/ebooks/?format=opds
• Framabookin : https://framabookin.org/

Chapter 3: The First Card Index?

Markus Krajewski outlines some of the history of the creation of the first library card catalog and structures it in such a way as to create parallels between its structure and that of the structure of a modern day computer.

He covers the creation of catalogs at the court of Vienna, the Vienna University Library, an an attempted but failed national cataloging effort in France called the Bureau de Bibliographie at the Louvre. By 1974 the French effort had at least 1.2 million cards for 3 million volumes.

In published instructions issued on May 8, 1791 in France, Gaspard-Michel LeBlond by way of standardization for library catalogs suggests using playing cards either vertically or horizontally but admonishing catalogers to pick one orientation and stick with it. He was likely familiar with the use of playing cards for this purpose by Abbé Rozier fifteen years earlier.

Benedictine abbot Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch (1734 – 1785) in creating the Catalogo Topographico for the Vienna University Library created a nine point instruction set for cataloging, describing, and ordering books which included using paper slips.

Interesting to note that the admonishment to leave the backs of the slips (pagina aversa), in the 1780's seems to make its way into 20th century practice by Luhmann and others.

catalog, until a successor card catalog comes along in 1848. Only the<br /> absence of a bound repertory allows the paper slip aggregate to answer all inquiries about a book ’ s whereabouts after 1781. Thus, a failed undertaking tacitly turns into a success story.

The Josephinian card index was created, in part on the ideas of Konrad Gessner's slip method, by accumulating slips which could be rearranged and then copied down permanently. While there was the chance that the original cards could be disordered, the fact that the approximately 300,000 cards in 205 small boxes were estimated to fill 50 to 60 folio volumes with time and expense to print it dissuaded the creation of a long desired compiled book of books. These problems along with the fact that new books being added later was sure to only compound problems of having a single reference. This failure to have a bound catalog of books unwittingly resulted in the success of the index card catalog.

Austrian National Library; it is widely, and often proudly, considered the first card catalog in library history.

The first card catalogue in library history, later known as the Josephinian catalog, began on May 22, 1780 in the Austrian National Library.

Abbé François Rozier cleverly transferred book titles onto the blank side of French playing cards instead of cut octavo sheets as a means of indexing after being appointed in 1775 to index the holdings of the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

It really kills me that there's so much hero worship of all this, particularly given the information processing power of index card systems at the time. I don't really think it took such a leap to image automating such a system given the technological bent of the time.

Of course actually doing it is another thing, but conceptualizing the idea at the time would have be de rigueur.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/516040483/vintage-industrial-steelcase-index-card

aliases for "topical headings": headwords keywords tags categories

According to one of his students, Leibniz used his note cabinet both for excerpts that he took from his reading as well as notes an ideas he came up separately from his reading.

Most of the commonplace book tradition consisted of excerpting, but when did note taking practice begin to aggregate de novo notes with commonplaces?

Leibnitz created a plan for creating a library card catalog for Wolfenbüttel in December 1690, which would have been similar in form to 20th century card catalogs, but the idea was never carried out for lack of employees and funding.

Hugo Blotius was a librarian at the Vienna court library from 1575 to 1608.

This algorithm described in Gessner, 1548 fol. 19-20 is precisely that of a zettelkasten, though effectuated with slips of paper either glued or held by thread rails into a book.

The last point number 4, even takes it so far as to arrange the individual notes into a logical order and copy them into something fixed, which one could readily view as an article.

Gessner, Konrad. 1548. Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium. Zurich: Christoph Froschauer.

Konrad Gessner's second edition of Bibliotheca Universalis in 1548 contains a list of keywords (loci communes) thus placing it into the tradition of the commonplace book, but as it is published for use by others, it accelerates the ability for others to find and learn about information in which they may have an interest.

Was there a tradition of published or manuscript commonplace books prior to this?

unfortunate project of devising a comprehensive catalog for the Harvard College Library marks the birth of the American card index—out of a spirit of sloth.

William Croswell's work at creating a comprehensive catalog for the Harvard College Library results in the first card index in America.

In the 19th century, the box of paper slips (zettelkasten) as a technology reaches the east coast of the United states by way of librarians who study in Europe and then apply the practice of cataloguing their own collections.

The first card catalogue dates to Vienna around 1780.

Curiously, and possibly coincidently, the idea of the index card and the invention of the house number co-occur in the same decade and the same town. This creates the potential of abstracting the representation of information and people into numbers for easier access and linking.

I felt some of this missing piece and so included the idea of human interaction as part of the process to make up the balance.

The primary value of the card catalogue and index cards as tools for thought is that it is a self-contained, uniform and mobile carrier that can be arranged and processed based on strict systems of order. Books have many of these properties, but the information isn't as atomic or as easily re-ordered.

procedure for the writing and reading head to move over the paper segments. This book seeks to map the three basic logical components of every computer onto the card catalog as a “ paper machine,” analyzing its data processing and interfaces that may justify the claim, “Card catalogs can do anything!”

Purpose of the book.

A card catalog of index cards used by a human meets all the basic criteria of a Turing machine, or abstract computer, as defined by Alan Turing.

What a great quote to start off a book like this!

Paul Chavigny, Organisation du travail intellectuel: Recettes pratiques a` l’usage des e ́tudiants de toutes les faculte ́s et de tous les travailleurs (Paris, 1920)

Chavigny was an advocate for the index card in note taking in imitation of "accountants of the modern school". We know that the rise of the index card was hastened by the innovation of Melvil Dewey's company using index cards as part of their internal accounting system, which they actively exported to other companies as a product.

Or by all of the above... Library card catalogues did all three, but most digital systems will effectuate all of them as well.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/medieval-book/using-medieval-book/a/finding-books

Note the similarity of this filing cabinet system to the similar ideas of library card catalogs.

Where does this fit into the timeline with respect to the publication date of 1749 on Pharmacopoea and Linnaeus' use of it?

Ryan Holiday notes the similarity of his method to that of the Dewey Decimal system and library card catalogs.

At the end of the Josephine catalog, including a sophisticated system of references, it contained around 300,000 pieces of paper. The fact that he was the first card catalog to write library history was more due to a bug in the program. Actually, according to [Gottfried Freiherr] van Swieten's ideas, at the end of the process all bibliographical information should have been transferred from the slips of paper to a volume catalog. The reason for this programming error was an economic calculation: the planned catalog would have easily comprised 50 to 60 folio volumes and would have been out of date shortly after completion. That is why the Vienna Zettelkästen became the first relational search engine with an expansion function.

Description of the invention of the first library card catalog?

http://www.verzetteln.de/books/monographs/4_paper/

esta ficha, pero cualquier otra parte de la página mantiene una línea de baja interacción por parte del usuario: por ejemplo, al no poder subrayar alguna de las partes del texto, la funcionalidad de hypotesys queda reducida a referirse a algún concepto en particular. Claro, ha de pensarse que el cut and paste tiene contrapeso en propiedad intelectual solo qe también merma el potencial de hipervínculos para el aprovechamiento de la información de manera académica. Unas de cal .... En este caso quedan a debate las palabras referidas a "De esta manera los indígenas protegieron a la deidad de su destrucción"