"adequate cataloguing" [3GAR]
Remember when looking up a book in the library meant a stop at the reference librarian's desk or a trip to the massive banks of card catalogs, to browse through cards notated with the famed Dewey Decimal System?
Those days may seem long gone, thanks to the Internet and so many digital tools available in libraries everywhere. But that doesn't mean we don't wistfully long for the manual and tactile efforts to index and find our favorite books.
Some years ago, we came across a site called the Catalog Card Generator. We dutifully filed it away and recently found it buried in our "Drafts" folder - dated January of 2007, if you can believe it.
We found the tool on the site of John Blyberg, then the Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience at the Darien Library in Connecticut. [Aside: John was previously employed by the Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan - just a few miles from your editor's house.] John lists his site, blyberg.net, as "a library-geek blog."
Now that is our kind of site! Need we say any more?
The Catalog Card Generator takes information that you feed it - from the call number to any text you wish you use to identify your collection of books, video or audio, as well as notes that can be "scribbled" on three distinct areas of the card - and outputs an image of a vintage catalog card, with a typewriter font on an aged index card with perforation.
Here are some variations on an entry from our library:
Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.
Image credit: "SML-Card-Catalog" (Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
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