There are still some librarians who do what they can to save the card catalogs under their care. The librarian of the small, separate library-school library at Berkeley, Patricia Vander-berg, stores her two card cabinets in the stacks, out of range of the administrative eye, but she has kept them. They were edited by a now retired librarian named Virginia Pratt. Ms. Pratt “did some special things to that catalog,” Patricia Vanderberg told me. The university, however, which is in a self-mutilating mood these days, plans to merge the library-school library with the main library, and before the merger there will be a severe culling; the card catalog will almost certainly be thrown out. But for the time being, if some afternoon, depressed by thoughts of cardnage now in progress, you were to travel to the stacks of the library-school library, you could restore your good spirits by contemplating an unharmed, unshrunk, fully operational (though frozen) subject catalog.
Fifty drawers compose it. They are made of blond wood. Pull out one of the “C” drawers, the one labeled “Catalogs.” Here are several guide cards: one for “Catalogs,” one for “Censorship,” one for “Children’s Literature.” Before you have read or touched a single card, you have learned something important about the library-school library, and even possibly about librarianship in generaclass="underline" the edges of the cards following the guide cards for “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” are dark with handling, whereas the ones following “Catalogs” are not. Thus “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” have over the years been of more interest to library-school students than “Catalogs” has. This is a surprise — at least, it was a surprise to me. Maybe it’s one reason we’re in this pickle.
And abruptly you realize, looking at these expressive dirt bands, that even the libraries, like Harvard and the New York Public Library and Cornell, who microfilmed or digitized some of their cards prior to destroying them, have — by failing to capture any information at all about the relative reflectivity of the edge of each card — lost something of real interest, something eminently studiable. Who knows what a diligent researcher who photographed (from above, on a tripod) each close-packed drawer of Harvard’s Widener catalog with a high-contrast camera might find out, were he to correlate his spectrographic dirt-band records with the authors that, as distinct clumps, exhibited some darkening? Of course the “Kinsey” cards would be thoroughly dirt-banded — but which others? This is, or was, a cumulative set of scholarly Nielsen ratings for topics at twentieth-century Harvard that is perhaps more representative than any other means of surveying we have. Instead of tossing its catalog out, Harvard ought to have persuaded a rich alumnus to endow a chair for dirt-band studies.
If, though (back at Berkeley’s library-school library), you now take a glance at those two other major subjects in the still-extant subject catalog, the ones more popular than “Catalogs,” and begin by flipping the “Censorship” guide card toward you, you will note that Virginia Pratt has prepared some helpful “See also” material, typed with a red typewriter ribbon on several different models of typewriter:
Censorship
SEE ALSO
Libraries — Censorship
Liberty of the press
Expurgated books
Prohibited books
Condemned books
Books and reading for youth — Censorship
Government information
Children — Books and Reading — Censorship
Book burning
Pornography
A second card goes on, still in red:
Censorship (continued)
SEE ALSO
Freedom of information
Audio-visual materials — Censorship
Libraries — [Place name] — Censorship
Young adults — Books and reading — Censorship
Textbooks — Censorship
School libraries — Censorship
And then in black there follows:
For additional material on this subject see:
Vertical file: Intellectual freedom
MELVYL will retrieve all the subject headings in this helpful list that have the word “censorship” in them, because that is what it mechanically does, but it will not give you any of the others, since their access relies on the perceived relationship between two categorical concepts rather than on rote text strings. As a result, once this subject catalog is thrown out, Milton’s Areopagitica, a work of brilliance and occasional syntactic impenetrability protesting the 1643 act of Parliament that required the seizure of “scandalous, unlicensed, and unwarrantable” books and pamphlets — a work, surely, of some small importance to the history of political censorship-will, because MELVYL lists it under “Liberty of the Press” and “Freedom of the Press” instead of under “Censorship,” not come to the attention of a library-school student, or any student, interested in writing a paper on the topic.
Similarly, the “See also” card that Virginia Pratt wrote for “Children’s Literature” lists sixteen sensible cross-references, including pointers to “Fairy Tales,” “Storytelling,” “Biblio-therapy,” and “Juvenile Literature”; MELVYL, on the other hand, offers an unmanageable and indiscriminate list of 745 subject headings, none of which is “Fairy Tales” or “Storytelling”—though MELVYL will obligingly refresh your screen with another disorderly list of 306 subject headings for “Fairy Tales” if you think to ask it to. Ms. Pratt’s card catalog is good, it is smart, it knows what we need to know — it wants to help us be better librarians. Before we junk it, forcing students to depend instead on subject headings bought in bulk from pooled databases that have been edited not by minds but by iterative software routines, perhaps we should read a little of Areopagitica, since the cards were kind enough to refer us there:
We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather than a life.
It is not just crankish and extreme to say that a “kinde of massacre” is going on in libraries right now. There is the exuberant recycling of the card catalogs themselves; and then there is the additional random loss of thousands of books as a result of clerical errors committed in disassembling each card catalog, sorting and boxing and labeling its cards, and converting them en masse to machine-readable form — a kind of incidental book burning that is without flames or crowds and, strangest of all, without motive. If a great research library, in the process of converting two million cards, loses track of one tenth of 1 percent of them, say, severing our access to two thousand books that offend nobody, we can only shake our heads in astonished perplexity. “A few things”—i.e., cards—“that weren’t converted got dumped, but, you know, that’s the nature of life,” Judith Brugger, of Cornell, said to me; and every cataloger and technical-services person I asked admitted that there are now books in their library that, owing to inevitable slipups of one sort or another, aren’t in the online catalog that is supposed to help you find them. Or there is an online record, but the book isn’t on the shelf where the computer says it is. Barbara Strauss, formerly of OCLC, told me that the flaws in online catalogs have created a whole new class of in-house dislocation specialists: people who, like the editors of corrupt codices or of early editions of Shakespeare, are able to divine from the existing computer record what sort of text-entry mistake might have been made, and hence where they should begin to look in the stacks for those ghost books that they know they own but just can’t find.