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.

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

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

Encyclopedia and Dictionary

I grew up in a house with a big dictionary on a stand and a complete set of the 1962 World Book Encyclopedia.  The actual dictionary and stand are pictured below (that's not actually me or my old house, it's my nephew at my Mom's  condo).  I recently acquired a complete World Book Encyclopedia set identical to the one that I grew up with.

When I was in school, one of the key ingredients of every classroom was a dictionary and every school library was built around its encyclopedia, atlas, and other reference works.  To this day, the accrediting institutions still list the library with its book collection and reference materials as a key issue.

World Book Encyclopedia

With a sweet sense of irony, I just looked up "encyclopedia" on Wikipedia and found:

...The beginnings of the modern idea of the general-purpose, widely distributed printed encyclopedia precede the 18th century encyclopedists. However, Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert (1751 onwards), as well as Encyclopædia Britannica and the Conversations-Lexikon, were the first to realize the form we would recognize today, with a comprehensive scope of topics, discussed in depth and organized in an accessible, systematic method... 

In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of several large popular encyclopedias, often sold on installment plans. The best known of these were World Book and Funk and Wagnalls... By the late 20th century, encyclopedias were being published on CD-ROMs for use with personal computers. Microsoft's Encarta, launched in 1993...The 21st century has seen the dominance of wikis as popular encyclopedias, including Wikipedia among many others.

Random House Dictionary of English Language

 Encyclopedia Britannica  -- at its peak, had around 2,300 in the sales force....A year ago this week, the last salesman for Britannica, Myron Taxman, retired.  He was 66. He began selling the encyclopedia at the age of 22, when he was still in college in Chicago. He sold the volumes for 28 years: to farmers and to new parents without much money, to a Bears quarterback and to film director John Hughes.  (Encyclopedia Britannica Salesman Mourns End Of Print Edition)
Another memorable aspect of the encyclopedia era was the door-to-door salesman who sold them.  A surprising number of people of my generation spent some time selling them.

What did the standards say about using reference works and finding them with alphabetical order?

Language Arts: K

Information and Media Literacy

Research Process:

The student will:

1. ask questions and recognize the library media specialist or teacher as an information source; (LA.K.6.2.1)

2. use simple reference resources to locate and obtain information through knowledge of alphabetical order, use of pictures, and environmental print (e.g., signs, billboards); (LA.K.6.2.2) Language Arts: 2 Information and Media Literacy Research Process: The student will: 1. generate research questions by brainstorming, identify key words, group related ideas, and select appropriate resources (e.g., atlases, non-fiction books, dictionaries, digital references); (LA.2.6.2.1) 2. select and use a variety of appropriate reference materials to gather information and locate information using alphabetical order; (LA.2.6.2.2)

And who can talk about reference materials and refer to media centers or libraries without going back to the card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System.

This card catalog is proudly featured in the entryway to the Time4Learning office.