By Lawrence I. Charters (writing as Herr Kaiman)
LSA Open Stacks, Volume 23, Number 4, October 4, 1976, p. 2.
Almost any modern library of today will house a wide variety of devices designed to take some of the drudgery out of basic information retrieval. Film projectors of all types have been developed to speed the process of reviewing slides, motion pictures, and other items which, if examined by hand, would prove too bothersome to even bother with. Computer terminals are common sights at circulation desks, and are far more efficient at reading the little holes in punched cards than even the cheapest part-time help. Telephones and intercoms, if properly used, should reduce the amount of screaming down halls and out of windows once thought essential for proper staff and public communication. And, of course, typewriters and printing presses have greatly reduced the incidence of early blindness, though the speed with which errors can be made has gone up dramatically.
Yet, for all of these technological miracles, there is at least one major feature of every library that has, thus far, resisted every effort to upgrade i: the card catalog. Some minor modifications have been explored, including painting it, constructing it of plastic or metal instead of wood, dividing it into separate author / title / subject divisions, reducing the height by more than half to prevent backstrain, and other superficial changes. After all is said and done, however, the card catalog remains essentially the same: a cold, looming, lifeless mass, inelegant and out of place in a modern house of knowledge.
But it need not remain so any longer! Thanks to Japanese technology and New Jersey peasant labor, marvelous and inexpensive electronic gadgets are being produced or developed which may soon put an end to the card catalog as we know it. Scientists and engineers, sparked by a hunger for knowledge and fat government grants, are finding new ways to use electricity, and inventing circuits and other gizmos which use electricity more efficiently, too. Though most researchers are, of course, too cautious to make any definite predictions, it is entirely possible that some new advance will result in the use of even less electricity in card catalogs than is used at present, which is none! This idea may seem hard to grasp, but it should highlight just how far technology has come.
There still remains, of course, the rather trivial question of what part of the card catalog should be electrified. Indeed, it is possible that some may even question the necessity of making electric card catalogs at all. But if we ignore these doomsayers and nostalgics and can bring ourselves to accept the fact that time is passing the quaint old-fashion, manual card catalog by, it is clear that the golden age of libraries lies just over the technological horizon.