card catalgoue

The card catalogue was once the mainstay of my maiden visits to public libraries: the first in my memory being by the public swimming pool on San Vicente Blvd. by the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, where we would collect children's books in the summer; the more regular outpost of my youth being the branch on Robertson Blvd. between 18th and Airdrome, before the massive renovation, where I used to check out books for new yoga poses or meditation techniques in what amounted to a dark, oversized room that smelled of hot dust. In the center of this room, like an anchor or a pole that pitches a tent, stood the card catalogue. At my elementary school, I recall taking out a drawer of a card catalogue - which they told us never to do - to try and get at one of the cards way in the back, only to accidentally drop the drawer and spend the next five days after school re-alphabetizing all the cards that had scattered across the floor. (In my subsequent encounters with card catalogues, which became fewer and farther between, I learned in retrospect that cards are usually actually attached to their drawer by means of a rod that runs its length and through a hole at the bottom of all the cards to avoid precisely this mishap.) And in my middle school, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. library, we spent an entire afternoon learning the Dewey Decimal System - I distinctly remember it being the single most boring day of my school career (which is still in process). In the end, the only thing I used that library for was to take my AP exams under the patient gaze of a poorly rendered MLK.

Yale's Sterling Memorial Library displayed its card catalogue semi-reverently in the gothic bays of its first floor - something you had to pass by on the way to get in to actually use the library. I still recall the admissions materials that made a point of highlighting the (by then out-of-use) card catalogue with the language reserved for any of its other treasures or precious curiosities. By contrast, the card catalogue for Harvard's Widener Library is nowhere in sight, though the one for the Fine Arts Library still mutely surrounds the computer terminals. There was a rumor my first year in graduate school that they were going to throw it away, but that did not come to pass.

Now the library I find myself using on a daily basis is the library at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the University's art library. And here I am confronted with the bizarre presence of the card catalogue once again, not as a relic of a bygone era, but as something I must actually use. Any book the library acquired before 1990 (I think) has to be looked up in the card catalogue, a call slip filled in by hand (each one separately, each with my full mailing address), and the book picked up a few hours later. The catalogue is organized by Author, Keyword, Galerienkataloge (which are museum catalogues), Kuenstlerkataloge (which, more often than not, are gallery catalogues), Auction catalogues, and Periodicals. If I wanted to look up all the books about the artist Naum Gabo, for example, I would have to go online and then go to the card catalgoue. I would then look up his name in the Keyword drawers, where I would find three books about him. Then I would look his name up in the Author drawer, which might yield another one or two tomes. Finally, I would check the Kuenstlerkatalog, and find, to my relief, the bulk of the books on Gabo, which a library of its quality certainly has but which, for some mysterious reason, are not also cross-referenced in the Keyword catalogue. Unfortunately, in the case of Gabo, as I experienced two days ago, his Kuenstlerkatalog drawer is currently being entered into the online catalogue at last (a good thing), making it unavailable for at least a week (a bad thing).

Having already lived through the era of agonizing digitization of library catalgoues (and suffering at the moment as slide libraries make the analogous "upgrade"), I am none too pleased by my daily guesswork with the Basel card catalgoue. And this despite my general leniency towards bibliophile nostalgia.