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If you’re old enough, you can smell this picture.
And hear it too. The hushed silence of a big library.
Technically, this is an index. YOU were the search engine.
Although, you could use an AI, or Allied Intelligence known as a reference librarian instead.
Is it not a database?
The bookshelves are the database, the index cards are the index, as they help you to quickly find the information you want
“Pathetic human race. Arranging their knowledge by category just made it easier to absorb. Dewey, you fool, your decimal system has played right into my hands”
THE BIG BRAIN AM WINNING AGAIN!
And now I will leave for no raisin!
I went to Bletchley Park recently, and they have a single room full of these where they would intercept codes from the Germans, write them down, file them away, someone else would come in, triage the 100s of new messages, take the most promising in a van and drive it off for it to get decoded.
An endless operation, apparently cars were constantly coming and going just to decode these messages
Here’s to the Dewey Decimal System!
Library of Congress > Dewey Decimal all day every day 😜
naa. that guy and his system was kinda quite bigoted.
The system is solid imho, the way it was originally organized can be reorganized.
I kinda wish I would have known how is to live like that.
maybe be a terribly boomer take coming from a 22 y/o but I kinda just hate how the modern world is, and probably the past is worse in almost every way but damn it just looks so peaceful to look trough those cabinets for info rather than the clusterfuck than today can be, specially with AI nowdays everything is probably fake so is so much harder to know what’s real and what’s not.
Ditto as someone turning 30 soon
The worst part is when all this was first being digitized it was actually magnificent and worked beautifully.
Then came the ads…
So most of the time, it was like this.
I know this is a long gone time but it was quite different from that. At home you had an encyclopedia, a compact mini Wikipedia. For more in depth browsing you went to a library. If you wanted to learn more, you borrowed some books. Things were slower, people actually had the time and will power to actually study these books. If you wanted to know even more you could get more boons or take some courses.
Printed encyclopedias were horrible. Most of the time, they didn’t have an entry for the thing you wanted, and when they did, you usually got a paragraph or two of information.
Books and libraries sure, but not for every one-off thing you wanted to know. You’d be there all day
I can’t relate. They had a paragraph or two on almost anything. Sure that was not much but it was enough as a starting point for figuring out if you wanted to know more.
You didn’t need to be in libraries all day. Depends how much research you wanted to do or how in depth your question were. For many first glances in some topic it was enough to look at your local book store and maybe get an introductory book on the topic (or borrow that book from a library).
Sure, things were slower back then, on the other side, people had more time to actually read the stuff and also the stamina to do so and not stayed totally on the surface as 2 min later they were already onto something else. Upsides and downsides.
The internet has been a great enabler for people with the stamina and interest to actually really educate themselves but many are just floating on slop and information trash nowadays, learning nothing.
I grew up with these as an Xer, so I know what it was like trying to find a book with them. Modern library catalogs are so much nicer to use. But I’m still a huge fan of the Dewey Decimal System. And when you find a library that still stamps the due date in the books, it’s great seeing the last time someone has borrowed a book, especially if its been a long time, I borrowed one book of essays in grad school 2019, it was acquired in 1988 and I it felt great to be the first person to borrow it. The book wasn’t even one I was looking for but it was on the shelf beside the one I was after and it looked interesting, and it turned out to be great.
Yeah, I really liked the discovery of adjacently placed books. The original “algorithm” of titles you may be interested in.
It was awful and I don’t miss it at all.
Being able to read any book without going to the library, let alone getting off the toilet, is a fucking miracle and anyone who makes that more difficult should be viewed with contempt by every intellectual.
Nothing peaceful about spending 2 hours finding a book, finding a citation about a fact you were interested in, thinking, ‘did so and so really write that?!’ and then having to wait 3 weeks for an interlibrary loan only to discover that the author did, in fact, make it up in the first place and add a citation to make it appear that it was fact.
Books are peaceful, reading is great, I prefer reading on paper, I don’t miss the part of the process the card catalog was involved in.
it was wonderful and i miss the card catalog. searching on a computer is not the same thing at all. the card catalog let you /browse/.
and the more i think about it, the more i come to the conclusion that humans are inveterate browsers. search is fine if you know what you want, but browsing is how you figure out what you want.
bring browsing back!
For sure, I still brows the stacks in the library, and I kinda stopped watching movies after video stores closed, streaming just isn’t the same.
But card catalogues really sucked for dyslexic kids who’s spelling is pretty shit. Electronic catalogues win there!
It’s kinda funny though, I’ve started writing physical letters again and mailing them, sometimes I’ll write something down and look for the red squiggly on the page and quickly think to myself “shit, it’s a pen and paper”. My correspondent will just have to deal with my spelling, hah.
dyslexic kids who’s
Heh. Sorry.
I think the major difference you might be looking for is tasks/media that are paced and motivated by the person doing/consuming them, and for that I heartily recommend books.
audio books are generally fine, but this is the key thing they lack. ebooks do this fine as long as the device youre reading on isn’t networked. read some ‘art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ and ‘society of the spectacle’, then just some Utopian fiction, maybe start with le’guinn.
its not the time. its not even the specific technologies. it’s the characteristics of the implementation of them. refine what you’re longing for. try shit out. don’t put on the nostalgia goggles.
it’s missing the point, I know is not better and probably way slower and annoying, but it just looks so peaceful, I wish modern information seeking were as peaceful, and not just like aimlessly navigating this world of lies the internet has become.
that’s the thing. there are elements there which appeal even if overall it was awful. what are those elements, and what can we learn about them to apply to the future?
shit does not have to be this way. technology is not inexorable. this shit is not purely the result of technology. this is a political decision about our economic system, about who controls our technology, and about how power is exercised.
what would all or most of the modern capacity with whatever you find appealing about cozy mid 20th century library world look like? what would it feel like? how do you build that?
Public libraries still have books, movies, and games that you can borrow for free. Going from card catalogs to electric catalogs was great and the Internet was amazing. My, probably bad, xennial take is that web2.0 is where it started to go wrong. The original web was too decentralized and chaotic for a corporate takeover but 2.0 was pretty much built to allow corporations to seize control.
This very much still exists in many libraries especially ones in Japan.
What was great about card catalogs and physical dictionaries is that you would find things that you’d never thought of.
Start looking for ‘Magellan’ and end up with books on ‘magic.’
You could ask your local library if they still have their index available. I know mine doesn’t update it anymore, but they haven’t removed it either.
Well, if you lived in a small town like I did, you didn’t have stuff like this. And we weren’t strictly poor, but money was a lot tighter back then (1980s). My mum sewed a lot of our own clothes for instance, besides the job she had. We were one of the few families from our town who went to Italy for holidays though.
I’m going on a tangent/rant. For most money wasn’t tighter( in most families, yes you now represent everyone lol). Homes/rent was cheaper but luxuries were more expensive.
This creates an environment where you looked poorer and had less shit but still had similar overall financial situation.
The fucking issues with that is stress. And this is what those boomers don’t fucking understand. Yes, I have digital services and a bunch of toys, but 3 months without a job and I’m homeless.
End of tangent.
This looks like the backrooms
This is actually the front room.
*search index
Library catalog*
Index are so beautiful 🥲
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I wouldn’t mind if they brought this back.
You would if you ever were the one to file.
I once had a short internship in a company and got assigned to filing. Going on my merry way I sorted everything by voucher number before entering them in the cabinets.
Then I looked up and realized that there were more than one set of voucher series for different sub companies and they all had the same voucher numbers in each their series.
Tough luck for anybody who ever needed to find those vouchers ever again. It’s not like I could undo it.
