Well duh.

[captainsblog]

To anyone I've ever recommended NPR podcasts to:

When all else fails, read the directions.

I began downloads of This American Life in December. Every Monday since beginning that, I've been turning on iTunes to get my WaitWait download, but for the past four Mondays, I only got the other one.

Hmmm, the show must be on Christmas reruns or something.

Now yesterday, I left for church rather early (I was the liturgist for the 11:00 service), and I got to hear some of the show in the car, so I knew it was a new one.

Just now, I turned on iTunes, got my TAL download, kept clicking the "update" symbol in the corner, and.... nada.

Finally, the light dawned. Maybe I have to click on the name of the podcast I actually want.

One brilliant idea later, four missing episodes magically appeared and are downloading as we speak.

When I die, file me under "Dangerous, Knows Just Enough to be."

----

Speaking of filing (since the legal world is dead today and I can't do much else whilst adding a gig or so to my hard drive):

A Friend posted a picture in her journal yesterday, which apart from its text content made me wonder just how much of a bygone era it represented. It wasn't this, but it looked like this:



Okay, quick. How many of you are familiar with what that is, and how conversant with them are the ones who are?

[Poll #907331]

----

I'm sure all except the youngest of the kids here have had much experience with the buggers, and that even they went on the obligatory Library Tour in elementary school to learn Teh Ruulz. For us, it was an entire subsystem of English, in which there were no pseudonyms, alphabetizing was an exact science, and the distinctions between author, title and subject for different kinds of research were key.

Just as important, though, was the ambience. Those banks of catalog drawers were the ultimate sign in academia that size really mattered. Walking into the Union Catalog room of Cornell's Olin Library was like entering a cathedral. Just the room holding the cards was bigger than most libraries I'd ever been in.

Gradually, and inevitably, technology took over. UB's turned into BISON, and the Rochester library's into CARL. With that change, though, came a lack of precision, and knowledge of the things even we amateur bookhounds had learned.

Nowadays, computers, being the soulless beasts they are, don't give you the chance to browse in that same musty-yet-tactile way. Just a random example for you, of a search on my own county system's fine online catalog, for the author whose book I am finishing as we speak: Bill Bryson.

Right off we're stuck going down four paths, based on different indexers' preferences:

# BRYSON BILL 44 Titles
# BRYSON BILL 1951 4 Titles
# See related headings for: BRYSON WILLIAM
BRYSON BILL
# BRYSON WILLIAM E 1 Title

I'll go with 44 Title Guy, since I know my author's fairly prolific. Out of those 44, just his most recent book goes down three different memory holes, each of them needing to be searched to confirm media type, location and availability. And that's one of the lucky ones. One of his previous works, Notes from a Small Island, shows up at 20, 22, 27, 35, 36 and 37 based on slight variants in the input. (Remember, you must input them every 108 minutes or the library will explode.)

Now lather, rinse, repeat for the other three journeys and you really start to miss having a human being intervening at the top end of the process.

----

Still, what's done is done. What's tougher is what is happening to the remnants of how things used to be. Ever expanding collections and tight spaces have convinced most libraries to reclaim these prime spots of real estate, and for the most part, the cards and drawers have gone to the scrap heap. As this article notes, the enlightened folks at nearby Alfred University actually set 100,000 of the cards on fire in a symbolic funeral pyre to usher in the information age.

Others have come up with creative uses. The Palo Alto, California library auctioned off its collection and actually preserved history in the process. And here's a University of Iowa site which offers the cards to artists who have made cool shit out of them like this:



I know that time must march on, but I just hope that after I'm gone, some cyber-employee of the Fisher & T'Pau Funeral Home doesn't convert my memory into a million little diddlybits and then misfile me with two L's in the middle of my last name.

Comments

[baseballchica03.livejournal.com]

Eeeehh, I don't really miss the card catalog too much. I used it in grammar school and for the start of high school, but it was mostly phased out by the time I got to college. What I really miss is the vertical file. You could find the coolest things in there! If you were bored, you could just open it up and pull out something neat! Now everything is digitized. Kids today don't know how good they have it. (Now get off my lawn.)

[cafemusique.livejournal.com]

Ooo...I'd forgotten about the vertical file. I'm trying to remember where they had them that I used them...probably my high school library...

This thread makes me want to go hug a librarian and share some memories...or something like that...

[goodfoot08.livejournal.com]

What I miss about card catalogs are the natural qualities of a better time they embodied. [Man, that sounds old.] The tangible access to thousands of cards is not replaced by a screen (I almost said CRT, but THAT too is old-fashioned, now). But from my earliest use of card catalogs, they always were built of the finest hardwoods to exacting standards that made the card fit perfectly and the drawer move smoothly on bearinged sliders out of its perfectly shaped shelf in an exact ninety degree angle. I am sure there were flimsy metal affairs somewhere, but your average public or school library bought theirs when fabrication standards were high and the best materials were used. to be honest, I remember the cards getting tattered and dirty. And, if not replaced, they certainly took on a yellow tint.

[shinuhana.livejournal.com]

I was forced to use them through about high school, but I never did get the hang of them. I never remembered the author or title exactly enough that I could find anything, and the books were never under a subject that I thought they should be under. Finding them using electronic searches is much better, although I've found that card catalog googling skills are helpful at finding exactly what you want.

The good thing about the old cards was that it was easy to pick a subject and find a lot of books that you never knew about that might help you on your way. I don't get as many interesting strays the internet way.

[lindapendant.livejournal.com]

I would buy that cool shit.

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Classics library at UB uses a card catalogue. They're just in the process of going digital. And I like both systems-- the internet is faster, but the catalogue is more likely to give you a good tangent to follow.

(Of course, the best experience in a library for me is using the oldest books-- the ones made by typewriters. You can actually feel the type. :)

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

Glad you found your programs! As for the card catalog, I remember searching desperately in the one at college...looking for sources for the umpteenth term paper of the semester.