You do know that Churchill was making fun of those people, right?

Thank you for your answer. Yes, skills change with the technology, but they don’t simply replace older skills. They are an additional layer of knowledge. I’m in favour of keeping the old card catalogs, especially in libraries with historical heritage. They are an archive (I am an archivist and historian…but not nostalgic). Of course, serendipity is also present in online catalogs, but the discoveries are different.

NLM carefully reviewed its cards before the big recon thirty-plus years ago, and some cards were kept. The current review is also a question of many eyes and hands, and some cards will remain. Serendipity (of a different kind) still exists with an online catalogue – – – one can browse a subject heading while limiting by date, for example. The skills change with the technology.

I could not write proper Palmer if my life depended upon. We could have a whole other thread about penmanship, and how cursive writing is (and isn’t) being taught today.

Bibliographic instruction will never quite go away. Thanks!

Agreed: a bad record is a bad record, whether it’s a card or online. Moreover, some of the shelving information created during the Old Red Brick building days is still in use today, which is why we have to check the cards against the online catalogue, to make sure that we are not discarding that the only remaining record of that information. But with a properly done online record (done by a real live trained librarian), there are a far greater possibilities for searching.

I do need to correct one claim, however. “But with modern online catalogues, it really doesn’t matter. ANY search will take you to the full record.” Only if someone has entered the information in the first place, either as a secondary entry in the bibliographic record or (preferably) as a cross-reference in the authority file that is linked to the bibliographic file. In other words, it is just as accurate to say that “catalogs are only searchable using the strategies already put in place when the bibliographic files were created.” Some human being — some librarian — has to analyze the item and create the records and establish the links among the files.

Yes, great memories.

That’s why we still need librarians!

There is such a thing as research comfort food.

I’m with Winston Churchill on not ending sentences with prepositions: “This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”

Thank you!