Saturday, January 9, 2016

Card catalogs

It seems just like yesterday that I was going to the library, looking up books in the card catalog, and seeing where they were cataloged based on the Dewey Decimal system. Now, it's all obsolete and gone. But, not to worry, these memories will be kept alive in the RetroEdTech museum at the VocabularySpellingCity headquarters. This past week, courtesy of a local school, we obtained an original old style school library card catalog.
School Library cart catalog
Card Catalog


These card catalogs enabled students to look up books by subject, author, or name and then locate them on the shelves using the amazing Dewey Decimal System. The Dewey Decimal System is a library classification system developed by Melvil Dewey in 1876 and regularly revised since then. The Decimal Classification introduced the concepts of relative location and relative index which allow new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject. The classification's notation makes use of three-digit numbers for main classes, with fractional decimals allowing expansion for further detail.

Do you follow the TV program, the Big Bang Theory? If you do, you've probably noticed that Sheldon's and Leonard's room features a card catalog in back.  I keep wondering when it's going to become part of the plot.

Card Catalog in Sheldon & Leonards Room
Card Catalog in Sheldon & Leonards Room
The Media Centers of old, prior to the digital revolution were packed with both reference and literature materials.   RetroEdTech has these posts on those topics:

Encyclopedia and Dictionaries in School Libraries


Golden Book informational books and stories were read by tens of millions:

Back Cover of Golden Books: The Golden Library of Knowledge
Back Cover of Golden Books: The Golden Library of Knowledge