by Marshall Keys
Executive Director, NELINET

A friend was visiting here from OCLC the other day. He is a man who puts together big electronic projects, but he was talking about a much older technology, the catalog card.

Most of you know that I am a big fan of catalog cards and think that something important was lost when they fell victim to electronic records in OPAC's and local systems. But I am not a Nicholson Baker; I think that card catalogs are lousy. It is the catalog card that I like.

The virtue of the catalog card was its universality. Whenever you went, they were the same. Some were more detailed than others, but the information was presented the same, and you could always find the information in the same place. Electronic catalogs allow libraries to customize their information displays as they wish. This is both a feature and a bug. The ability to customize would be fine and dandy if the ability to design attractive and informative interfaces were evenly distributed in the population. But like everything else worth having, it isn't. Like wealth, wisdom, wit, and waist-lines, some have the ability to design and some don't. Remember desktop publishing when the Mac arrived on the scene?

OCLC still prints 1.5 million catalog cards a month, albeit at ever-higher prices. But the days of the catalog card are numbered, and not only because of changes in practice. They are limited because of the limited life of the technology that produces them. OCLC has three remaining card printers. No one else has these printers, no one else has anything like them, and there are no other printers that produce such high quality. There are dwindling stocks of repair parts for these printers, and there is one elderly gentleman in Columbus who has come out of retirement to maintain them. When they are gone, when he is gone, card production will have to cease.

There are work-arounds. There are programs to print cards locally, and New Hampshire outsources its card production to the state prison; if prisoners can make license plates, they can print cards! And the prisoners apparently do a good job and have done so ever since they learned that a 3 x 5 card means 3 x 5 and not 3 1/8 x 5 5/16.

But face it. The catalog card is a goner, just like the IBM 8088 computer and Epson FX 80 printer carefully preserved up in my attic. As a self-adopted Yankee, I long ago embraced the admonition to "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" (some say I am an adopted Yankee precisely because I find that admonition so congenial), but the time comes, folks, when you just have to let go, and for the catalog card, that time is long since here. The clock is ticking on those printers in Dublin.

Thanks go to Marshall Keys for giving me permission to reprint this article which appeared in THE NELINET LIAISON of September, 1997. - Matthew Higgins.