The Card Catalog at the Library of CongressĪs of 2015, the Library of Congress site says, “You might be surprised to learn that we still sometimes use card catalogs in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room, where our cards typically lead to photographs, drawings and other visual materials, rather than books. Supposedly, they keep it there for older patrons who occasionally use it, but the catalog remains an important historical archive. The Library of Congress still holds its entire (paper) card catalog, which is currently gathering dust in the basement, essentially a relic abandoned by modern society. In the age of the internet, one would think that the obsolete card catalogs have disappeared, but true to form, collectors dedicated to organizing written volumes have turned to collecting the organisation forms themselves. That, friends, is a remnant of the Dewey Decimal System, a relic of the card catalog used in libraries for 200 years. Depending on your age, you might remember the tiny envelope with the stamp card in the back of your library book. We have, of course, come a long way since then. That’s right: the oldest known form of organizing books predates the books themselves.
Information was scarce in its written form, and so scribes and scholars developed a meticulous system for organizing libraries of tablets. Card Catalogue Room at the Library of Congress, 1941.īefore books were easily printed and accessible to nearly everyone, before they even took the form of books specifically, there was a different story.