This morning on NPR I heard a segment about Sandra Cisneros, an author, discussing her use of language and what influenced her style. What I found so interesting was how she remembered visiting the Chicago Public Library as a child and looking in the card catalog. She saw that some of the cards were more dirty and dog-eared than others, and she wanted to read those books, because they must be great, important ones. From there it was only a quick jump to wanting to write her own books, books that would have their own dirty, dog-eared cards.That made me kind of sad, because we just don’t live in that world anymore. I’m not bemoaning technology, because as a librarian I am incredibly thankful for computers and boolean searches and OCLC. But, when the catalog is on a computer, we can miss out on the human aspect of accessing information, or the serendipity of flipping through the card catalog and running across exactly what you need. We might be more exact, and it is certainly easier, but it is also more impersonal.
Kari, The Library of the Past, at Through a Glass, Darkly (May 3, 2004).
It seems that the old ways are often considered better simply by virtue of their age. I remember the old card catalogues in the libraries that I frequented as a child: the cinderblock-walled basement library of Holmdel Township, nestled beneath the Police Station; the expansive, stuffy library at Rutgers University; and the Victorian estate-turned-library at Monmouth University that was featured in the film Annie. The card catalogues at Rutgers were arranged in a twenty yard long row, and had many gaps where students had torn away the yellowed, typed cards. Beneath Holmdel's police station, the card catalogue was one nine-drawer cabinet, reflective of how few books were actually in the library. Then, at the Monmouth University library, the contents of the card catalogue were largely unknown to me. Being a blatant non-college student - well, being a short 10-year-old - meant that I was not entitled to the full resources of the university library, instead relegated to the reference room and its collection of encyclopaedias.
Today's dirty, dog-eared Dewey reference cards are the links and cross-references of the internet. They are the notion of the meme, whether they propigate on the Book Talk links of Technorati or fire back and forth across the wires by way of the many blogs' trackback functions. Trackback, I've learned, has been one of my favorite ways of mining information. Finally, there's the source that I've used to find Through a Glass, Darkly: the topic search function of Bloglines (in particular, I have the aggregator searching for {literature or stories or authors or "richard russo" or "raymond carver" or steinbeck or camus or "booker prize" or "pulitzer prize" or "o henry"}).
Information is so fluid now. The static, dirty, dog-eared Dewey reference cards of the past are quickly-disappearing reminders of the past. Now, there are so many ways we can sate ourselves in our search for more.
Update
I've since modified that search term to: {literature russo camus steinbeck carver "short story" "short stories"}.
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