The current situation is not without a few hopeful signs. Cornell’s Judith Brugger was nearly ready, I felt when I talked to her, to recognize why her own university’s card catalog — whose brutal pollarding proceeds apace — deserves to be spared. Ms. Brugger has degrees in Russian and English as well as in library science, is capable of a passing reference to Derrida, and is full of ideas about how to modify the Anglo-American cataloging rules so that librarians can venture forth and catalog the Internet, which needs it. Twice, she startled me by using the words “art form” in reference to card catalogs, something that nobody else had done. And she mentioned, as an example, the Library of Congress catalog, so “brown and beautiful and round” that it could “bring tears to your eyes.” She spoke reverently of the tiny catalog at the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, which is “quaint and perfectly specific and completely comprehensive.” She has even kept some handwritten cards as souvenirs of an earlier job. And yet, amazingly, of her own library’s cards she said simply, “They have to be burned.” Cornell possesses what is, in her estimation, “the Velveteen Rabbit of card catalogs.” It has mismatched cabinets. It has broken drawers. It is incorrect.
Mightn’t it, I asked, develop a hint of saving quaintness over the next fifty years? Mightn’t there be ways that future historians could extract unexpected insights about life and thought and prevailing mental taxonomies by analyzing how Cornell once classified books, and how it revised its classifications over time? “We don’t see any research value in archaic card practice,” Ms. Brugger told me. “User studies are the thing now, not particularly strategies for recording data.” (A few days later, she called to be sure I understood that she was speaking on her own behalf, and not on behalf of Cornell, which, it seems, has no official policy vis-à-vis its card catalog — although it’s hard to see how a dumpster can be construed as a value-neutral storage site.)
But when Ms. Brugger said that user studies were the thing now, I thought I heard her waver: Woopsie, she seemed to be thinking, maybe user studies won’t always be the thing? Maybe paper database strategies will be very hot in twenty-five years? What I took to be a truly hopeful sign, though, was Ms. Brugger’s unexpected metaphor: Cornell’s card catalog equals Velveteen Rabbit. That beat-up, brown-and-white spotted, sawdust-stuffed hero of Margery Williams’s book for children is a sympathetic figure, who becomes more precious and indispensable to the Boy who owns him the more his fur wears away and his tail comes unsewn and his boot-button eyes lose their luster. The only way for a possession, a toy, to become “Real,” the Skin Horse explains to the Velveteen Rabbit, is for it to be loved:
“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
When the Boy falls ill with scarlet fever, and the doctor orders the gardener to burn the threadbare, germy Velveteen Rabbit, the Velveteen Rabbit grows sad and sheds a tear on the ground. Out of the tear, a flower grows, and out of the blossom of the flower there appears a magic fairy, who saves the Velveteen Rabbit from being burned by changing him into a real rabbit. This may or may not be a sappy story, but as an allegory of card catalogs it works fairly well. It goes something like this. The User loves his Velveteen Catalog so much that it begins to show signs of wear and tear: broken drawers, mismatched cabinets, out-of-date subject headings, worn cards. The User sickens financially, and he is unable to keep a watchful eye on the Velveteen Catalog. A Doctor of Technical Services orders the Velveteen Catalog burned for the User’s own good, and replaced with a new, more antiseptic reference toy. Awaiting its fate, the Velveteen Catalog lets fall a single drawer, out of which blossoms a savioress, who helps the Velveteen Catalog escape into the stacks by transforming it from a Real catalog into an even Realer art form. A moment’s reflection suggests that Judith Brugger secretly sees herself — unbeknownst even to her — not as the cold-hearted torcher of Cornell’s cards, but as their salvation.
And it’s a good thing, too, since even non-Cornellians may remember one especially eminent, especially studied user of the Cornell catalog during its glory days: V. Nabokov. He and his fictive friend Timofey Pnin would regularly withdraw the heavy Slavic Literature card trays from the “comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet” back in the forties and fifties, and, on the wings of a hundred typewritten, time-and-space-spanning cross-references, would overleap the irrelevant ocean and return for an hour or two to green, mythic, pre-Revolutionary Russia, inhabited by lost leading lights like “Kostromskoy” and “Zhukovski,” and Aleksandr Pushkin. The very cards that Nabokov turned and pondered while he worked on his translation of Eugene Onegin are, as far as I have been able to determine, still in place in Cornell’s shabby-genteel catalog. The library would be well advised to keep them there.
But the real reason to protect card catalogs is simply that they hold the irreplaceable intelligence of the librarians who worked on them. Kathryn Luther Henderson, a professor at the library school of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, “I’ve made catalogs I’ve been very proud of, or had a hand in making them.” Her work, and Virginia Pratt’s work, and the work of all those other people who spent every weekday thinking about the interconnectedness of the books around them, deserves praise and admiration, not clear-cutting. “It’s going to be another generation before we realize that we’ve done this, and what we’ve done,” Professor Henderson said. When I talked to her, she told me that she had some cards that were produced, she thought, in the 1850s for the Harvard catalog. “If somebody came into my office and I weren’t here, they’d probably throw them out,” she said.
There are other, higher-volume card hoarders, too. One of Maureen Finn’s operators at OCLC worked on the retrospective conversion of chunks of a catalog from the University of Washington. The university didn’t want the cards returned — they wanted OCLC to toss them out on the spot. But this operator (too reticent to consent to an interview with me) didn’t go for that. He had looked carefully at the words on those cards; he had reached an understanding with them. He is, according to Maureen Finn, currently storing portions of the University of Washington’s card catalog in his apartment.
But the biggest and most heroic hoarder of them all is Tom Johnston. Mr. Johnston is the painter and conceptual artist who, simply because he asked for them, is receiving hundreds of thousands of cards from Harvard’s Widener Library. The real treasures, in a sense, of the now incoherent Widener catalog are or will be his, for he is currently being sent the cards representing, in part, seldom borrowed books that the library is moving to off-site storage. I reached Mr. Johnston in October of 1993, at a number in France, and asked what he plans to do with them all. He was spending several months at a huge, empty château in the Sauternes region; the pieces of the Widener catalog, however, were arriving steadily (much to the dismay of his secretary) at the Department of Art at Western Washington University, where Mr. Johnston teaches. Of course he could, he said, have them forwarded to France, and paper the rooms of the Château Suduiraut with them, or dig a trench a mile long and bury them there, but so much of contemporary art destroys things, and he has decided that he isn’t interested, this time, in destruction for artistic ends. Still, he does want to “get them in front of the public,” somehow. There is a beautiful museum in Bordeaux; he was considering writing a proposal to create a “really nice” conceptual installation with the cards there.