>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:07 ^M00:00:19 >> Rebecca Brasington Clark: Welcome to the Library of Congress. This is a very familiar place to many of you, but we're so delighted to see such a robust turnout for this event, Mapping the Wilderness of Knowledge, the Card Catalog Past, Present and Future. This event is being recorded for future webcasting, so please take a moment if you haven't already to silence your phone or tablet or device of your choice. My name is Becky Brasington Clark. I'm the Director of the General Publishing Office at the Library of Congress. Our office is charged with promoting the library's collections and scholarship through the publication of books and other products. Today's program was inspired by the release of a new book, this one, The Card Catalog, Books, Cards and Literary Treasures written by my colleague, Pete Deveraux, co-published by Chronicle Books in association with the Library of Congress. He will kick off this afternoon's program with a broad history of the card catalog featuring highlights from the book. He will then turn the program over to Beacher Wiggins, the library's Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access who will then introduce and join our stellar lineup of speakers. I hope you'll join us immediately following the program for the reception and book signing. Books are for sale out in the foyer, and we'll do the signing out there as well. We do have coffee, tea and cake, and if you haven't seen it, it's not just any cake. It's a card catalog cake. So we're geeking out on that. Before we begin, I would like to offer sincere thanks to Beacher and his colleague, Susan Morris, for developing this program and supporting the participation of our out of town speakers. I'd also like to thank our co-publisher, Chronicle Books, whose generous support made this event possible. Thanks very much to Wanda Cartwright and her colleagues in the Special Events Office, and extra special thanks to publishing office colleagues, Anna Freeze, who managed every detail of this process with enthusiasm, efficiency and good humor and Marietta Sharperson who navigated us through some last minute administrative mazes. On the fly here, I want to thank Dwight and Keith and Blane and all the other chair herders for stepping up to the plate and just getting some extra chairs on the floor. Thank you very much. Now, I'd like to introduce Pete Deveraux, a writer, editor in the Publishing Office and author of The Card Catalog. Pete's career was launched in the scholarly publishing sector where he worked for Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins. He left Lippincott to become a librarian at the Enich Pratt Free Library where he had the privilege of working alongside Carla Hayden. Upon joining the Library of Congress Publishing Office in 2012, Pete brought together his publishing and library experience. He's contributed to or edited six additional books for the library and we are really fortunate to call him our colleague. Thank you very much. Pete Deveraux. ^M00:03:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:23 ^M00:03:30 >> Pete Deveraux: Well, thanks Becky. It's an honor to be here with my esteemed colleagues from the cataloging community. I'd also like to thank Hanny from the Publishing Office for helping put this event together. This book was a great opportunity to tell a story about an unherald yet extremely important part of the libraries, the card catalog, one of the most versatile and durable technologies in history. The reality is most card catalogs are long gone. We're not sure how many people realize what a massive and unprecedented undertaking it was. So I hope people will pick the book up and read about the history and continued importance of cataloging here at the Library of Congress. So what I'd like to do is briefly run through a fairly brisk and general history of cataloging in a progression towards the Library of Congress' card catalog. When I started research for this book, I struggled a little bit with finding a starting point that made sense. After reading about Somarian historian, S.N. Kramer, I understood the story really started at the dawn of civilization. He clearly identified one [inaudible] tablet found near the ruins of [inaudible] dated around 2000 B.C. as being used for cataloging purposes. At just 2.5 by 1.5 inches, the tablet foreshadowed the use of small index cards. It was divided into two columns listing the titles of 62 literary works including the epic of [inaudible]. From Mesopotamia, the next stop is the ancient library of Alexandria. The collection consisted of papyra scrolls. Organizing the library proved very difficult as scrolls had no title page, table of contents or even author listed. The Greek poet and scholar, [inaudible] was chosen to devise a way to provide access. This cataloging of the scrolls called the [inaudible] made him one of the most important figures in library history. He completed around 250 B.C. It was arguably the first time anyone made a sophisticated list of authors and their works. From the surviving fragments, scholars deduced the scrolls were divided into separate classes such as poetry, philosophy and law and then further subdivided into a narrow range of subjects. Moving ahead some 1700 years, once Gutenberg's printing press was established, books spread quickly across the continents. As publishing grew, there emerged a uniformity in the layout and design of books. Title pages, table of contents and other conventional elements started to appear. As it applied to cataloging, this information was a game changer though the staggering number of books being printed was unexpected and ancient libraries during the renaissance struggled to keep up. Rising to the challenge, Swiss bibliographer, Conrad Gesner, brought cataloging into the modern era with his ambitious attempt at compiling a list of Latin, Greek and Hebrew books in print. Gesner spent years traveling around Europe visiting libraries, collecting bookseller and publisher's lists. In 1545, the first volume of his Bibliotheca Universalis, the universal library, was published. It included an exhaustive alphabetical listing of over 2000 authors and titles. The work established Gesner as the father of bibliography. So what many consider the first national library card catalog happened during the chaos of the French Revolution. In 1791, the assembly issued instructions to local officials to be in cataloging libraries that had been confiscated from exiled or executed aristocrats. The method relied on playing cards, which were then blank on one side. Playing cards were a perfect choice. They could be purchased throughout France. They were sturdy and roughly the same size no matter what brand, and they could easily be interfiled. Within three years, over a million cards were sent to the overwhelmed offices in Paris. The original books of the Library of Congress did not survive for long. The collection went up in flames just 14 years after they were acquired whe the British ransacked Washington in 1814, torching the White House and capitol. When news of the fire reached former President Thomas Jefferson, he wrote to a friend in Congress and offered to sell his personal library. Jefferson adapted his cataloging scheme from Sir Francis Bacon's system that started with three main categories, memory, reason and imagination. Later modified by Jefferson through history, philosophy and fine arts. These categories were broken down further into 44 distinct chapters that fully encompassed the entire collection. By the mid 1800's, major developments were happening in the library community led by Smithsonian librarian, Charles Duwet [assumed spelling] who sought to "form a general catalog of all the books in the country with reference to libraries where each might be found." At Harvard, assistant librarian, Esra Abbott, is actually credited with creating the first modern card catalog. His associate was Charles Cutter, became librarian of the Boston Anthenaum in 1868. There, Cutter created a new scheme that would later help establish the basis for the Library of Congress classification system. Though Cutter's cataloging rules were adopted by many libraries, he is overshadowed by his occasional rival, Melville Dewey, whose approach to cataloging was based on a controlled vocabulary represented by numerical values that could be subdivided by decimals. It immediately caught on and expanded Dewey's influence within the library community. Around this time, Anesworth Rand Spotford became the sixth Library of Congress. And his approach to cataloging and managing the growing collection was much more idiosyncratic than the emerging transient professional librarianship. In his view, "The organization of a library is a subjective one. I think the best system in classifying a library is that which produces a book in the shortest time, and this is a great picture of the old library in the capitol of the chaotic scene that rumor has it only Spotford could find the books. This quote from Spotford stood in direct contrast to librarians that signed on as charter members of the American Library Association. The first issue of its official publication made clear the most pressing issues facing libraries was the lack of standardized catalog. For Dewey [inaudible], establishing these standards was only half the battle. ^M00:10:08 The growing number of libraries across the country, they advocated for a cooperative cataloging agency that would issue cards from a central location. And the newly expanded Library of Congress seemed the natural fit to take the lead. Shortly after opening the new library building, Herbert Putnam became librarian in 1899. And JCM Hansen and Charles Martel were appointed to lead the new cataloging division. They confronted a collection of more than 800,000 books, hardly any of which had been cataloged by subject. Hansen later wrote that when faced with this incredible job, "There was no printed or written rules, no definitive verbal instructions. Apparently, it will be part of the wisdom to cut loose from the old catalog all together." It was therefore decided to begin an entirely new catalog on standard sized cards 3 by 5 inches. With the larger staff, catalogers created a new classification system inspired by Cutty and Dewey as well as integrating a new system of subject headings. In 1901 with its own dedicated branch of the printing office in the basement and equipped with new [inaudible] type machines, the library began to crank out cards at a rate of 225 titles a day and nearly 70,000 a year. The titles were printed on the best linen ledger stock 40 cards to a sheet. They were then cut into bindery to the index size and a hole was punched in the bottom for the guardrail. Upstairs the cataloging division worked long, hard hours doing the tedious work of classifying, proofing, revising, sorting and filing the millions of cards. On October 28, 1901, more than half a century after Druett suggested the federal government centralize the printing and distribution of catalog cards, Putnam sent a memo to more than 400 libraries announcing a sale of its printed catalog cards. In 1976, former Library of Congress cataloger and historian, Paul Edlin, wrote, "Few libraries have been untouched by the work done by library staff members over the years. It would be difficult to walk into a library anywhere in the United States, be unable to find one of these physical byproducts of the intellectual efforts of the cataloging staff of the Library of Congress." I think that's an appropriate quote when introducing our next speaker. Beacher Wiggins is the Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access at the Library of Congress. He's been with the library since 1972 and his present position since 2004. He has been an active member of the American Library Association and the ALCTS Division of ALA for more than 30 years. And he recently was the winner of the 2013 Melville Dewey Medal Award sponsored by OCLC. Beacher. ^M00:12:54 [ Applause ] ^M00:13:00 ^M00:13:05 >> BeacherWiggins: Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see you, and I have to say I was given thanks for helping and being cooperative with this program, and that's really all it was because all thanks go to Susan who was arranging this while I was on travel this year. And so I'm just doing what I was told to do. Even to the name of the very brief remarks I'm going to make, the good, the bad and the ugly, I'm not sure I would have used any of those for any number of reasons, but hey, I try to stick to the plan, which may be a reason I've been around so long. Now, it is obvious that while I'm snowcapped and I think you probably can do deductions that I've been around awhile. In fact, yesterday I received -- was observed the 45th anniversary ceremony here. I'm not so old that I was actually there and apart of the market development. So, we want to get that straight upfront. So now that we clarified that point,my memories are going to be and my remarks are going to be vicarious in nature and not because I was there. But I did have the privilege of working with Henriette Davis Avrom [assumed spelling] for five years as her special assistant. And as you might expect, I gleaned a lot from that experience in any number of ways that have helped me in the following years. Now, so I heard a lot directly from her as she orchestrated the developmental mark of automating the card catalog, which we are here today celebrating. In 1989, Lucia J. Rather who was then LC's Director for Cataloging, and I who at that time was a special assistant to Henriette who was the assistant librarian for Library of Congress Processing Services. Lucia and I wrote an article for American Libraries entitled MARK, Mrs. Avrom's Remarkable Contribution. In preparing that article allowed Henriette then to have time to reminisce with Lucia and me about the development of MARK, about her involvement and her assessment of MARK's evolution and the transformation of libraries for technical services and public services librarians and for catalog users everywhere and of every [inaudible]. Now, the good. When appointed to LC, Henriette quickly recognized that the most crucial aspect of library automation was to devise a standard vehicle for the communication of bibliographic data. The culmination of Henriette's work was among several lasting contributions was a format structure that became the basis for MARK'sformat worldwide and the MARK distribution service, a prototype that other national bibliographic agencies emulated. That same prototype, the MARK distribution service, also gave rise to the creation of bibliographic utilities, the foremost today being OCLC. In fact, OCLC might have been here at LC had Henriette gotten her way. As forceful as she was, she wasn't quite able to pull that one off, but we'll talk about that a bit in a minute. Another technical achievement was a process of format recognition. That is a technique to enable the computer to assign tags, indicators, subfield codes, fix field codes to machine readable records from catalog cards. Format recognition has been held as one of the early examples in fact of an expert or a thinking system. All due to Henriette's foresight. Now, the bad. Henrietta viewed the RECON, that is retrospective conversion of catalog cards to MARK data component as one of the great missed opportunities for libraries in the development of MARK. The library community did not [inaudible] its resources to convert all of LC's records at that time dating from 1898 to machine readable form would have advanced libraries immeasurably. Without doing so, libraries converted the same records with high costs and varying levels of quality which would end up being a disservice to library users everywhere. In fact, libraries across the country including LC and we're working on some now and I'm looking at a colleague who have stewardship of some that we need to do are still converting card catalogs and other manual files that are in need of conversion. So just think about that. That was 50 years ago, and we're still diddling about with some hidden connections to deep resources. The ugly. When asked what she would do differently in creating MARK, Henriette [inaudible] that for the LC MARK system she would not have designed a separate application for each form of material. For those of us who were around, I have to admit I was, MARK rolled out with monographs, serials of print materials. Then it went to various formats. In fact, I think it was into early 1990's before we had all of the formats ready and we were no longer transcribing information on sheets and cards, etc. That failure necessitated format integration in later years of MARK's implementation and use. Now, so as not to close on the bad, I'll share a tidbit on how Henriette who was not educated as a librarian which fooled many people, how she absorbed cataloging to such a degree that she could develop MARK and ultimately she could be recognized as one of the world's preimminent librarians. She was taught cataloging through reading and studying cataloging rules and also by two Library of Congress staff at the time. One, a seasoned librarian. Is Kay Collins in the audience? That is he. And along with a reference librarian so you had on the one hand someone who knew how to create the data that went into catalog cards and then you had one on the other hand who knew how to use and research that. So she wanted to make sure what she was doing was going to be the full ticket. ^M00:20:11 So in addition to her bedtime reading of the cataloging rules which I understand she did on a nightly basis from what she told me. She had these two colleagues who were working with her daily. I'm told that one of the learning tools that she used was a large facsimile catalog card. She placed it on the floor and she pressed top to bottom, left to right and absorbing each element of the card asking Kay questions of what should be there, what should not be there, and when he couldn't answered, he said, "Well, if we did it, there must have been a reason for having it so you ned to figure out how to put it into the format." So with that, I say long live the card catalog and its wanted legacy even as we look forward to its replacement bibframe, which I won't go into because I've talked about that to most of you, I think, and I think our colleague will cover a bit of that in a special format. So thank you for your attention to my remarks. ^M00:21:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:21:18 Now I'm simply going to go down the [inaudible] and introduce each of the colleagues, everyone of them I've worked with, but I'm not going through much introductory remarks except to let you know who they are and what their current positions are. The first will be Barbara Natanson who works as head of the reference -- head of reference in Prints and Photographs Division here at the Library of Congress. And I worked with Barbara on numerous occasions as we come together with both guidance on processing materials as well as the contents of prints and photographs. Then next to her is a colleague from outside the library, Christoper Cronin, who is Director of Technical Services at the University of Chicago, and I worked with Chris on [inaudible]. He's a former PCC chair,and I worked with him on the so-called big head's group at ALA. So we have a good long working relationship. Next to him is Kathy Woodrell who is here at the Library of Congress and is a reference specialist in decorative arts and architecture in the main reading room. And I worked with her on many occasions including some of our mentoring programs and other areas. And then last but certainly not least is Jennifer Baxmeyer who is a leader in serials and electronic resources team at Princeton University, and I've had the privilege of working with her both as we are rolling out bibframe and in the OCLC [inaudible], OCLC Partners Group at ALA. So these are our wonderful speakers this afternoon, and we're simply going in order and at the end of the presentation, we'll have time for questions, comments and your thoughts on today's sessions. So Barbara. ^M00:23:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:23:22 >> Barbara OrbachNatanson: See if we can pull this down. I feel like saying can you see me now? I also wanted to thank the organizers for this program, which gave me a chance to revisit my life with the card catalog. I see in the program that I'm listed as talking about the card catalog as early technology and that probably should be as my early technology. I handled a lot of catalog cards in my early career in the Princeton Photographs Division. But as you'll see, I'm think I'm going to argue that the card catalog was really advanced in technology with all of its benefits and efficiencies. The catalog helps us to envision multiple aspects of access to a large picture collection. So see what we've got here. So the Princeton Photographs Division has a proud traditionof using card catalogs. We once counted 40 different card catalogs and indexes and use in the division. At this point, we've converted much of that data into online records, but there's still card catalogs in regular use in our reading room. In the history of access, the Princeton Photographs Division Collections, card catalogs represented a flexible, cost effective form of access when compared with other access methods that had their benefits but also considerable drawbacks. With picture research in particular, users often don't know what they want until they see it. The contents of a picture and more indefinable aspects of the composition are especially crucial in the selection stage of searching. So one of the means of access implemented in the early days of the Princeton Photographs Division was to place the pictures in files for browsing. Direct, effective, satisfying. But unless one could invest the money and space needed to file multiple copies of the images under different headings, it also meant deciding on the one element of an image that seemed most prominent, most likely to be sought. If it's a picture of calamity Jane for instance, probably anyone wanting to know what the frontier scout and wild west show performer looked like would be pleased to find this picture under her name once one figures out which of her many names she went by and what you should look under. But there are other elements of the picture that could also be of interest, the setting, which turns out to be the grounds of the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901, the photographer and copyright holder C.D. Arnold, even the horse. Researchers studying the exposition or the photographic techniques of C.D. Arnold or horses used in entertainment at the turn of the 20th century would miss out. The handy 3 by 5 card bearing a description of the image and filed under multiple access points opened new paths for research. This point may seem obvious, but filing descriptions in a card catalog also promoted collocation. We had to deliberately include a name heading or a subject heading to file under and with well established principles of authority control, consistent use of headings enabled the user to count on all of the photographs of Martha Canary to be listed together. And cross references could easily be built in to lead from her better known name Calamity Jane to the authorized heading at the time. But a heading that has since changed in the LC name authority file where the authorized name is now Calamity Jane. This demonstration that in cataloging as in life, change is ceaseless, also illustrates that with each new technology comes new challenges. Cross references were easy to build in, not so easy to maintain, a point I'll return to in a minute. But back to my salute to the flexibility of the card catalog. One feature that was exploited to the fullest in our reading room is that staff organized the contents of each catalog devoted to a particular pictorial format in a way that made the most sense for the items they led to. While author, title, subject catalogs are the norm, with our fine prints, for instance, the entries are organized by century and within that by the name of the artist. Talk about visualization. Just a glance at the drawers gives a sense of the bulk dates of our collection. Since staff could record all kinds of information on a 3 by 5 card, in this catalog staff went beyond mere cross references to incorporate the authority record itself with all the research it represented. And lest you think that we traded the you know it when you see it element of access solely for word headings, I'll point out that with our historical print collection we revived the notion that seeing the picture as early in the search process as possible is a vast aid to research. Did the fabulous 3 by 5 card technology solve all of our access problems? What am I going to say? No. Just imagine how labor intensive it was to paste those little pictures on the cards. Combine that with the work involved in producing multiple cards, adding headings to them and filing them and maintaining headings and cross references with changing cataloging rules was also a challenge, and the results could be pretty messy in the absence of training in library hand. With the growing collection, it now totals nearly 16 million items even when we describe on a single card an entire group of images rather then describing the items one by one, the labor involved meant that there were thousands of images that didn't even get this level of description not to mention the physical preparation that would be needed to make it possible to serve the materials being described. Digitization and machine readable cataloging enabled us to describe, index and display images in far greater quantity with far greater speed and ease and enabled correspondingly greater speed and ease in the searching end. Keyword access to all the words in the records whether headings or not took the pressure off of the analysis and precision required to assign authorized headings and the maintenance that comes with that. Although we are still big believers in authority control and controlled vocabulary, we assess collections to determine what level of cataloging can practically be applied in light of the likely use of the images and other characteristics of the material. Sometimes that means relying on words found in various parts of the description as in these catalog records from images related to the Pan American Exposition. ^M00:30:19 Catalog records for some materials consist at least initially primarily of information that came on or with the items, generally recorded as a transcribed title. That's the case for instance with our 35,000 glass negatives from the National Photo Company Collection. The transcription provides searchable words but we've lost some of the benefits of collocation, that one stop shopping satisfaction of knowing you found all the relevant entries under the authorized name or subject heading. Therefore, we must remind searchers to think of the different ways names can be spelled and expressed. Similarly, it's important to think of synonyms that might have been used for a topic and to think about the words that might have been current in the 1910's and 1920's when the images were made and captioned. For the researcher interested in early auto travel, think roadsters, not our standard subject heading of automobiles. As you can see, sometimes particularly with large collections of negatives, very few words come with an item and sometimes not at all. To provide maximum access as immediately as possible, we take advantage of digital visual access in a way that the card catalog couldn't have readily provided. Related images are often physically next to each other in the collection. Exposing that arrangement offers an added form of access. Here, someone interested in auto racing at the Baltimore Washington Speedway in Laurel would probably be delighted to find this uncaptioned photo beside one that had a basic caption that mentions the location and date. Do you suppose there's a metaphor somewhere in the fact that I've switched modes from transportation to Calamity Jane's horse to speeding cards of the early 20th century? Electronic data and digital technology have expanded exponentially the universe of what we can make available from our vast and varied collections. But in my final ode to the card catalog, I'll note that there wasn't intangible or maybe entirely tangible quality that came with being able to see the size and scope of a card catalog. You had a physical sense of the universe of data you were searching. With many of our online systems, it's now harder to get a sense of the whole pool of data when it's searching so it becomes more challenging to figure out whether one search has been truly comprehensive. Helping researchers to picture the information universe we're presenting and how to navigate that universe is part of our ongoing mission. Thank you. ^M00:33:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:12 ^M00:33:22 >> Christopher Cronin: The microphones are going to go like this all day. Well, thank you and good afternoon everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Susan asked me to talk about how the University of Chicago built its catalog, particularly around its distinctive area studies collections and in particular [inaudible] languages or scripts rather. And I imagine I was asked also because of my connection to the cataloging community and the PCC, but I have to confess. I did -- I never cataloged in [inaudible] script myself. So my solution to this, how do you develop a presentation on something I have no personal experience with was to talk to my colleagues, many of whom in technical services were around when we managed the card catalog and also some members of our collection development team. And what they told me interestingly even though I talked to all of them independently and separately came into several kind of recurring themes, and some of them we've already heard a little bit about. And the first was how the card catalog over time reflected histories of our language. And our Slavic and eastern European studies bibliographer gave me this great example of how pre 1917 publications for Russian materials had to be treated and approached in very different ways. It turns out that 100 years ago tomorrow on May 11, that's tomorrow right? May 11, 1917 the Soviets, of course, wanted to remove as much of the [inaudible] history as possible,and they created a group that I think I see some coin people in the crowd, some PCC [inaudible] people in the crowd, a great group for the PCC. It sounds exactly like what we would do now. The assembly for considering simplification of the orthography. Doesn't that sound like a group, the PCC would form reporting to the standing committee on standards or something like that? So they wanted to modernize the language after the czarist period. So if a book was written pre 1917 orthography for -- in Russian, the bibliographers, the subject specialist, the public services librarians over time had to including now, this metadata is still represented in North American databases, certainly in worldcat to the extent that it has really never been harmonized and in our [inaudible] guide for this collection there is still a note that says if you want to determine if we have a pre 1917 publication in our online catalog or a database such as worldcat, you will have to retransliterate the Soviet title back into the old orthography to find it. And so whether you like it or not, you have to be a linguist to get to some of this data and what surprised me about this was we keep trying to uncover hidden collections all the time even ones we've cataloged, but are not really usable or findable and certainly this came to the [inaudible] for me when I was talking to my colleagues. Certainly also for this part of the world there were different histories and practices governing transliteration, and I learned from my colleagues that that scholarly transliteration was actually quite different from the transliteration developed by the Library of Congress,and so even now as our researchers look at those early source materials, we are transliterating a lot of these things between the various schemes. The words identity politics, this is Washington so come to the news media all the time. It's a catchy phrase, but certainly reflected. This is just one example of one country in less than a century how many time it changed its identity and its name. And a colleague, I wrote her quote from an email she sent me. Said, "Corporate entries in the card catalog told the entire history of an institution," bethat a government or a country or any other corporate body. All of these nuances of the deep impact of the evolutions of our language, culture, politics, geographies, the identities of our people were not only reflected in our card catalog but required a much deeper connection between the cataloging operations and the public services operations of the library than we do now. And one of the things that I meant to bring with me but I didn't was a manual that was created really by the catalogers to help reference staff understand how to navigate the catalog, and now we think you search and that's -- use the word search, you think type. But searching the catalog was an intensely physical activity back then and required knowing not just how the catalog worked but many other reference tools like [inaudible] and so forth. Sorry, Susan also asked me to talk about whether Chicago is ever a customer of LC's cards, and folklore has it we did get the cards but not for the card catalog, for selectors to make purchase decisions. I don't know if they were the same cards that we would have put in the card catalog, but it -- what the problem was was that our ability to use LC's cards really came down to this tiny little square footage on the card, the call number. We built our collections at times while LCC classification was still being developed and there was decades of history of catalogers building local classification schemes for our collections. That was very hard to give up, and we -- someone used the word intellectual contributions earlier, and certainly there would have been a deep connection to that work, and I would imagine led to us being so delayed in becoming an OCLC member. ^M00:40:04 We did not join OCLC until 1989. So most of our copy cataloging if we did it came through the tape loads from LC, but we also weren't contributing our original cataloging until quite late, and so those deep traditions, the expertise in cataloging that Chicago acquired over time then also as soon as we went into OCLC, I think that spirit of cooperation and sharing took hold. We joined the PCC, and I did get a chance to read the book a couple of days ago. One of the histories I learned in there was that Charles Cutter attempted to do something that I think the PCC and certainly all of its participating libraries, mine even this week itself trying to get better metadata directly from publishers as close to the time of publishing as possible. And if I can quote you first, [inaudible] I thought it was great. The quote the plan was to goad publishers into working with Charles Cutter on cataloging their own books through insertion of a paper slip containing the bibliographic information that could be used by libraries. The response from libraries was tepid. I was going to make you insert the blank, but I'll give you a pass. They viewed the scheme with skepticism and doubted it would provide the final answers to their cataloging needs. So I don't know when that happened but certainly a long time ago and more proof that the more things change the more they stay the same. We still struggle with that one. So we certainly, of course, this book is mostly about the public catalog, but I'm a technical services person, and I wanted to know what was managing the card catalog like on the back end? Certainly we had gigantic shelf lists. And one of my staff, our head of serials, Renee Martin, showed me this holdings card from the University of Chicago Serials Department. It is an annual report, a check in card for the annual report from the town clerk presumably from Sidney, Australia. Doesn't say Australia on it. And we see that it was regularly being received through 1989 in unbound status and at some point there's blanks. So by the absence of data you can assume we stopped getting it. And then you can also assume someone was curious, where is all of this stuff and tried to claim it. I don't know if they would have called it claiming back then, but that's what we would call it now, and you see there's a handwritten note at the bottom of the card dated 2/1/1941. It's not an ISO format so I can't tell you whether that means February 1 or January 2. It's got a Roman numeral in it. That's probably a convention for something. I can't tell you what. But the note says will be forwarded end of war. And I think what was so fascinating about that was preserved in these catalog cards even just the management side of things are these realities of information flow through our histories during times of global conflict and clearly how difficult it was to relay information and get publications during a period of time of conflict, but interestingly in a part of the world you don't normally think of as being the theater of war at that particular time, clearly a challenge nonetheless. I could go into a story about the abbreviation for the word analytics, but I will considering the esteemed venue I will not, but I will tell you that last month I mandated that all 250 something thousand instances of that abbreviation be spelled out in full in our catalog because we display the entire MARK record now, and I did not want that in there. So we got rid of that. So this was another note shared with me from the shelf list that demonstrates that the future is indeed longer than the past and the struggles that our colleagues faced back then were at their core the same that we struggle with now. This is a note that said we really want to do analytics for this, and we will do this if ever any time. And I think what we have learned is there will really never be more time. As a cataloging manager who has inherited the sins of many forefather's poor judgment in treatment decisions, I can say we no longer kid ourselves that there will be more time. We either do it or we don't do it. Lastly, I would love to thank you all for listening. I want to thank you for inviting me to speak at this event if only because it provided me with an important reminder of the history of my profession, the history of my library for giving me another reason to appreciate the precious fewof my colleagues remaining in my organization who remember what it was like and how that historical and institutional knowledge of how we essentially became who and what we are today. One of them, I just want to put her picture up is June Farris. She is our Slavic and Eastern European bibliographer. I got many stories from her, some so scandalous I couldn't even repeat them to you today, partly because they involved the Library of Congress. The juiciest ones really did. This historical knowledge, this connection to our past is at grave risk as our colleagues retire and these histories retire with them and this book that LC has published will in no short measure ensure that those memories of our cataloging humanity perhaps even a few strands of our cataloging DNA will be captured in there forever more and I want to thank the Library of Congress for that as well. Its been a great privilege. Thank you so much. ^M00:46:21 [ Applause ] ^M00:46:30 >> Kathy Woodrell: Well, I'm a little taller than that. I'm Kathy Woodrell, and I'm here to talk about using the main card catalog in reference work. So let's see, it's this. Oh, it's this. Thank you. So between 1802 and 1879, the library had produced at least 57 printed catalogs. I won't be reading to you the entire time let me assure you. When the Jefferson Building opened in 1897, there was no complete or current catalog, and the Librarian of Congress at the time, John Russell Young, stated that, "A library without a catalog is like a ship without a rudder." The main reading room staff did have a small drawer compiled with entries clipped from these various catalogs that was kept behind the desk. Much reliance was placed on the staff to remember the books in the collection. By 1900, a dictionary catalog containing 90,000 cards was on the floor in the main reading room, and by 1920, the catalog had grown. Between 1920 and 1950, the card catalog occupied a quarter of the main reading room, and it grew to fill the current reference assistance room that you see pictured here on the right, the machine and electronics resources center, what we call it currently, and the hallway between the two. When the catalog was closed in 1980, it had 22,000 drawers and 22 million cards. In 1990 or '89, the catalog was moved to two deck areas off of the main reading room and because the Carnegie steel shelving in the Jefferson Building actually provides structural support for the building, the circular card catalog cases that were in the main reading room couldn't be used and so we appealed -- the library appealed to libraries around the country to send us their card catalog cases cabinets since they weren't using them anymore and we received many of those. Now, the card catalog is on decks 16 and 33 just off of the main reading room. These images show one aisle of the main catalog -- card catalog on deck 33 and part of the shelves housing just A through P on the right. Because the cabinets were received from a variety of different libraries, the catalog is not aesthetically pleasing, but it is fully functional. And here are some caveats for fully functional. With 22 million cards, a misfiled card is a lost card and a lost card can be a lost item. Over the years, sometimes researchers will just rip the card out of the card catalog to bring it to us so we can retrieve it for them. Or they take the card to show their uncle that his book actually is in the Library of Congress. ^M00:50:09 In the movie J. Edgar which was filmed at the Library of Congress, Leonardo D'Caprio is actually shown ripping a card out of the card catalog. Several years ago, we discovered that all of the subject cards for birds had disappeared and had to be replaced. When I began in the main reading room, I was assigned a terrific mentor, Tom Mann. 28 years later, he still has lessons for me, but one of my first lessons was red tipped cards are subject cards. For many years, we were under the impression actually until I started working on this presentation that those numbers in the card catalog that looked like fractions were actually Jefferson numbers, and here's an example of a card that with the call number that looks like a fraction. There were two people who could convert them. I remember one of their names, Jefferson numbers converted. Who you going to call? Sigrid Milner. I'm sure she's no longer here, but you could call one of these two people from the reference desk and they would give you the accurate call number for the book that had that fraction. So I'm hoping some of you who are catalogers will be able to explain this fractional system. I don't recognize it. So -- but you can see in this card that the number has been crossed out and the new call number has been replaced. ^M00:51:56 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:51:58 Yes, sir. I wanted to tell you some stories about some of the people who've come to request help and had to use the card catalog. A few of my colleagues worked with a researcher who was a handwriting specialist, and he came to the Library of Congress to study the library hand as found in the main card catalog. In the 1880's, much was written about handwriting by Melville Dewey, the American Library Association and by Charles Cutter now known to us primariliy as part of the call number after the period. So prior to 1887, Melville Dewey began to promote library handwriting or the library hand as it was also called. He preferred the vertical style. He was interested in speed, efficiency and legibility. Should you be interested in library hand or for that matter telegraphic hand, railway hand or telegram hand, those actually exist, you can see David Caminsky's website. I've included it on the slide so you can -- and I will say that the article on library hand is actually quite interesting. Another story involving my colleague Abby Yokelson. A few years ago. She got a written letter from a researcher who was compiling a bibliography on author Wilkie Collins. He had seen an entry in the National Union Catalog for an edition of Collins' Woman in White, The Tale of an Amorphous Woman Who Had Escaped from an Asylum. LC was listed as the only owning library. In March of 2006, Abby first found the NUC entry and then she searched the card catalog. On the card was a handwritten note that I've circled on this and it says not found. As Abby examined the card, a chill wind blew through the deck as she realized that the note had been written 100 years ago to the day. We've been dealing with pre MARK records for a long time, and one of the ways that we deal with pre MARK records is by going to the card catalog to see where the mistake was made. I always heard that pre MARK was actually input by Scottish clerks or Scottish housewives, but -- and I don't actually know that. Much was actually lost in translation. So I'm making a bit of a joke here, but things were lost in translation. The cards in the card catalog often include content notes, series records, holdings records, cross references, records for uniform titles, automated records derived from them were often created using a limited profile of transferable information and the automated format often dropped unique characteristics and sometimes eliminated file information. Copy catalog protocols for machine readable records often [inaudible] local information in looking for other information. So issues with pre MARK,and I have an example here of something called porcupine's political sensor. You'll notice on the card that it says office. That was an early designation for rare book. And that is indeed where this is. But I wanted to show you the other cards behind this card and all the information that was kept on each of these cards. So the online catalog record for the political sensor does indicate that there are four rare book collections where this title can be found but much of the information on these cards is now missing. To effectively respond to a querie involving older materials, it's essential to consult the main card catalog and perhaps divisional catalogs, the copyright card catalog, the shelf list, the [inaudible] catalog, the National Union Catalog, bibliographies, reference sources and colleagues using these and other sources in concert is invaluable. When assisting researchers seeking historical information, the card catalog is an essential element. It is the authority for anything published prior to 1968, and many people don't realize that the first two aisles of the catalog hold just periodical titles. And those records are duplicated in the main card catalog. So these are just some examples of things that are found in the catalog. So many items in the catalog aren't reflected in the online catalog, and many, many of the library's foreign language materials and periodicals in foreign languages are only found in the card catalog. The older things that have been converted are primarily English language. In addition, changed subject headings is a very important topic. For example, aeroplanes was the -- used to be the term, we know use airplanes. Moving pictures is now motion pictures. Negroes is now African Americans. There's so many examples of changed subject terms, but in the area of the card catalog we keep two copies of the ninth edition of Library of Congress subject headings. That is the edition that was in place when the catalog was closed. Since there is no global search and replace in the card catalog,we are reliant on those older terms for identifying older materials. And the card here shows the previous term for Auschwitz, which I would never have been able to spell. I want to tell you a story about a card catalog success in which I was assigned a question froma woman in Texas named Gretchen. She wanted to find another woman named Eileen. They were pen pals when they were young teenagers. And the only information she had was this. Eileen had contracted polio and Gretchen had read an article about Eileenin a magazine published some time in the late 1940's or early 1950's. She remembered Eileen's address but not her last name or any other information. She didn't remember the name of the journal or the date. So step one, I had an address. I determined that the apartment building in New York City where Eileen had lived had been razed. It was now a parking lot. So then I went to the reader's guide for periodical literature and started looking for articles about a young girl who was recovering from polio. I found no entries. I then used the reference book that listed magazines produced for women's interests to identify titles that were available around 1950. Most of those titles were either not indexed or partially indexed. I then used the card catalog to get call numbers for several of those possible titles. Are you getting the fact that I can be like a dog with a bone with a reference question because I can. So I started looking. I went to the stacks, and I eliminated many journal titles and looked at more tables of contents than I cared to admit. There was one bound volume of the Ladies Home Companion missing from the stacks. ^M01:00:25 But the space was there. So I kept watching and returning and finally after about two months the volume was on the shelf again. I opened it up. The table of contents said that the article was in that journal. I was so excited. When I turned to the page, it had been razor bladed out. So I found another library that had that article and I had -- it was North Texas State University Library. I had them send the article to Gretchen. Gretchen when she received the article called to say what Eileen's last name had been and fortunately it was Dichek [assumed spelling], somewhat unusual and not Jones. So I was able to find a brother just using the internet, and I reunited Eileen and Gretchen after more than 50 years. Thank you and thanks to the card catalog. Although we no longer have the beautiful cases that formerly resided in the main reading room, we have all the information included in them. So please, come to the main reading room, use the card catalog and here's a current picture of it. Although not an option for the Library of Congress, libraries that have gotten rid of their card catalogs are doing really creative things, and so even though they're no longer in use, this is -- images from the San Francisco Public Library. They hired an artist to get people to draw on different cards that meant something to them and the upper floor in the San Francisco Public Library is wallpapered with these artistic cards. Here are other examples of art and creativity workshops at libraries using catalog cards. Here's an organization called the Library as Incubator Project. With that card catalog corset, who knew? And here's one from Columbus State University with all kinds of creativity made out of card catalog cards. It looks like as well as cards -- the checkout cards. So as the decorative arts specialist, I would be remiss not to share exciting possibilities for card catalog cabinets and cases, and you might ask where would I get such a thing? Well, there's always the magic of eBay, Google, Craigslist, Etsy, flea markets, and that will allow you to find organizational zeal. Look at all the things people have put in their card catalogs. And you can keep track of your items, and if you insist on using your card catalog alphabetically, there's alsop always Asti Spumante [inaudible]. So on behalf of the card catalog off of the main reading room and myself, I would like to thank you. ^M01:04:07 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:16 ^M01:04:22 >> Jennifer Baxmeyer: Well, I can't compete with wine in a catalog card -- card catalog, but I'm going to talk a little bit about how we at Princeton are using RDF vocabulary such as bibframe which Beacher mentioned to explore relationships in the inscribed and annotated material that we found in the library of Jacque Derrida and what we're doing to help expose those relationships in the form of link data on the semantic web. So little over two years ago, Princeton University acquired the personal working library of Jacque Derrida who was an Algerian born French philosopher who is considered probably one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. This acquisition was significant for us because the library consists of about 16,000 items including books and other material and Derrida's library was pretty much an immersive environment,meaning that it represents his sort of lifetime of reading. For Derrida, the active reading was not really a passive process. He was actively engaged in what he was reading, and he annotated much of it. These annotations included everything from [inaudible] to dog eared and paper clipped pages and pages with post it notes and other inserted material. In addition, many of the books in Derrida's library are actually presentation volumes bearing personal inscriptions from other philosophers and theorists as well as from a wide range of admirers. Today we've identified about 6300 books that have personal inscriptions. These inscriptions give us a glimpse into Derrida's global social and intellectual network. Perhaps equally important if not more so is the fact that Derrida himself annotated many of these inscribed volumes. He took note of where others mentioned him in the books, and he often annotated those particular pages. As a result, we're able to gain additional insight into his reactions about what others were saying about him because like most authors and writers, Derrida cared a lot about what other people said about him. So as we've seen from the previous presentations, we've -- libraries have a long history of organizing information, both for the purpose of preserving knowledge and also for making that knowledge available to anyone searching for it. We've made significant strides in organizing information beginning with simple lists of books engraved on clay tablets to the rich descriptive data found in our online discovery systems. The next logical step then is to share that rich data on the web so that it's value could be appreciated beyond the library. Unfortunately, one of the biggest obstacles to exposing library data on the web is in the way that the web can actually understand it is a reliance on the MARK format to encode our data. MARK has served us really quite well for half a century, but libraries are pretty much the only industry using MARK so our data doesn't play well with everybody else's data on the web. So we need to move away from MARK to a framework that allows us to create machine actionable data that is persistent and easily understood by web crawlers. So currently, we present data to library users through our online discovery systems. In addition for archival collections, we create finding aids that give more detail about collections than we can include in our bibliographic descriptions. At Princeton, the finding aid for Derrida's library presents the material in the order that he left it as far as we know. Some of it arrived in boxes out of order and anyway, it was kind of a mess. But anyway, which is useful for researchers because again it emphasizes the context and gives them an idea of his social networks. But the problem with finding aids just like with bibliographic records encoded in MARK, much of the data and the finding aid which uses encoded archival description is mostly textual. For the Derrida library, our rare books and special collections staff created identifiers to reflect the original shelf order of the material, meaning which wall the book was on, which case on the wall, which shelf and what position on the shelf. So this is really interesting to researchers because they can see, oh we've got Vampire Diaries next to Death and Transfiguration next to Fifty Shades of Gray. I'm making up stuff, but by being able to see how things were shelved, the researchers can deduce maybe or come up with assumptions about what he was thinking or what he might have been working on at the time he received a particular volume. But the problem with those identifiers is that with EAD, the Encoded Archival Description, the identifiers are basically just kind of stuck in what's basically a big ordered list, and so the types of quering that needs to be done isn't easily done. So this is where we are right now. We have rich data about library resources and collections, but that data has mostly been captured in text strings in a format that most of the web does not understand. So I'll talk a little bit more about Derrida in a minute, but let's go back to the online catalog. So online catalogs contain rich information about the resources we've been curating for centuries. What if, though, we were able to create an enhanced discovery environment for users from the wealth of nonlibrary data sources on the web that describe those same works, people and other entities that we represent in our catalogs. We can use linked data to help us get there. ^M01:10:34 Some libraries are already experimenting with enhancing their discovery systems with information pulled in from resources outside of the library. What if we could pull in data from Wikipedia directly into our online catalog like I have shown on this mockup in the middle of the page? Or what if we could provide visual representations of the relationships between authors when a user does a search by author? Perhaps we could create API's that could display interactive graphs of relationships for our users directly from within our online catalogs. The possibilities for serendipitous discovery suddenly become limitless. In order to reach the point of creating enhanced discovery environments for our users as well as reaching the point where our carefully crafted and curated and nurtured library data is exposed on the open web, we need to free that data. We need to free it from the confines of the library so that a user searching the web will not only retrieve results from commercial enterprises such as Amazon.com but will see links to resources held by institutions like the Library of Congress or University of Chicago or Princeton. Once we do this, we will pave the way for new knowledge creation. The project we're working on at Princeton with Derridas library aims to create a set of data that can be used by researchers and scholars to learn more about Derrida and his social and global intellectual network and to easily answer potential research questions such as which inscriptions did Derrida make comments on or Derrida is not known for his works on religion so where did he get all of these books on Judaism? Oncewe record the data using persistent identifiers instead of strings of text and model it using a standard such as the resource description framework or RDF, which is the standard model used for exchanging data on the web,we will be able to publish that data on the open web so that it can be used by others however they may wish. Perhaps a researcher is interested in finding out what kinds of people were sending books to Derrida? We might be able to assist that research by creating an interface driven by linked data that will allow her to form complex queries about the items in Derrida's library. Or perhaps another researcher is interested in seeing visualizations that show the geographic locations of people who sent books to Derrida and how these changed over time. That researcher could take the persistent identifier from names we've coded in our bibliographic descriptions, pull in data for geographic locations from something like geonames and then import all this into a spreadsheet, upload the spreadsheet into an online tool such as [inaudible] which was created at Stanford, and this would allow that researcher to visualize and analyze the relationships over time. But back to our question of how we might get there? The approach we're using at Princeton is two pronged. For the inscriptions, we're using the web annotation data model, which is the official -- which actually became an official worldwide web consortium recommendation earlier this year. For the bibliographic data that described the books in Derrida's library, we're using bibframe. We found that the core purpose of the web annotation data model fits well with the Derrida material. The model states annotations are typically used to convey information about a resource or associations between resources. For our purposes, the inscription itself is an annotation so the inscription is a body and then the public in which the inscription is written is the target. So then we have a model that we can work with and use that web annotation data model. So I mentioned earlier that Derrida sometimes annotated the books he received as gifts. Here's one of our favorite inscriptions from the collection that we came across when we were digitizing the inscriptions. You can see that Derrida has indicated his opinion of the [inaudible] by writing hypocrite explanation point to the left of the transcription. And this was actually an interesting case in modeling because not only do we have the one annotation being the inscription of the book to Derrida but then we have Derrida's shade on that particular person as another annotation. By using the web annotation data model and RDF, we're able to capture the relationships between the work that was given to Derrida, the person who sent the work and Derrida himself in such a way that the data can be represented as a collection of statements about those relationships. Each with a subject, a predicate and an object. These are called triple statements because they have three parts and the premise of linked data is that the subject of one triple can be the object of another triple. So this is -- I don't know if you've seen those linked data graphs with just like all these lines and circles. This is what is driving linked data, these relationships. You have an object and a subject connected with a predicate and then there's another subject that's the same as this object. And then we start to have more complex relationships that we can easily see in our bibliographic data that we have today. So and also because each triple statement will have a unique identifier,a computer can derive meaning from those statements in a way that's impossible with text screens. Another thing that we -- and I thought about this -- this wasn't part of my presentation so I'm digressing. When we were learning about sort of the history of the card catalog, I remembered at Princeton we got rid of our card catalog a few years ago and a lot of professors were really upset about it going away because for many of them that was their first place for research. Snd their area of expertise -- you'd go to that section of the card catalog and see just documents written on the back of the cards, in the margins and everything. And we've lost that. We lost that when we went to the online catalog. And what's nice about the web annotation data model and the idea of going forward with linked data is that we could potentially provide a way for researchers to start annotating the way they did the card catalog because the web annotation data model is set up where a person can make an assertion about a thing and show the [inaudible] of that statement so again, it brings it back to having the researchers and scholars more intimately associated with the catalog record so that's another exciting thing that I thought of while I was sitting there that doesn't have anything to do with what's there. So using bibframe which is -- it's in the second version right now -- will allow us to describe the gift books in Derrida's library using -- again using triples with persistent identifiers which are critical in order for linked data to actually work. We are actually able to put persistent identifiers in MARK, and a lot of libraries including Princeton are beginning to add these persistent identifiers called URI's to their bibliographic records in preparation for linked data. But the key difference between bibframe and MARK is that bibframe uses RDF, the resource description framework conventions and MARK does not. So bibframe is able to communicate, if you will, with the rest of the web where MARK is not. New data models expressed in RDF are necessary in order to shift to the linked data environment we're counting on to help us free our data so that it can be used in new and interesting ways and provide enhanced discovery environments for library users. Bibframe is the model that Princeton, other experimenters are using to realize the future for library data on the semantic web. Thank you. ^M01:19:02 [ Applause ] ^M01:19:11 >> Beacher Wiggins: Well, thank you everyone. No doubt, everyone has something to take away from the presentations today. Are there any thoughts from any of the presenters? Jennifer [inaudible] hers is into her presentation as she was talking. Anything striking to the rest of you listening to the others of you speak before we ask if the audience has any questions or comments? >> I'm just thankful that I deleted the last line of my presentation, which was a picture of a card catalog from our collection that is now used to store wine at a friend's house. So I didn't step on your toes with that. >> Beacher Wiggins: Questions or comments from the audience? Yes. ^M01:19:59 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:20:06 >> There seems to be a [inaudible] of articles in [inaudible] online publications such as Atlas Obscure [inaudible] who seem to have just discovered now card catalogs. Atlas Obscure wrote a long one. You'll appreciate this, about how the card catalog, the Library of Congress is gathering dust in the basement. And actually I kind of use that every day in [inaudible] materials to verify holding, and if it's gathering dust, it's because someone doesn't clean it. The [inaudible] articles again seemed to have discovered catalog cards in general and just [inaudible] about the amount of detail found on said cards. ^M01:20:48 And while part of me thinks well, it's great that cataloging in general and metadata creation is getting sort of wider attention, on the other hand, I have concerns that the manner in which this is treated makes it sound as though A, we don't include that kind of detail anymore, which we do, and not annotations but the actual cataloging and B, that what we do is some kind of [inaudible] lost art that is no longer practiced and again in my opinion anything that makes us sound like we're practicing an [inaudible] lost art leads to things like oh, we don't need libraries anymore. They just do those lovely historic things like write card catalogs and nifty hand. And I was wondering how you felt about what seems to be the even prior to the book the sort of re-emergence of the card catalog and catalog cards in sort of popular culture? >> I would just like to say I spoke with Tom Mann at length writing this book, and I think the quote's in the book, and he wanted to make clear the cards were not kept as he said I think for the texture of the wood and the sort of nostalgia. He wanted to emphasize their continued utility for cataloging and reference staff here at the library. So I hope that does come through in the book. >> Beacher Wiggins: Jennifer. >> Jennifer Baxmeyer: Of course, I have to respond to my friend, Deb. But I think one of the problems -- I mean, one of the reasons that there's this perception that we're doing -- that we're not doing the same thing anymore is because we hide so much of it in our online catalogs because we've assumed that the users don't want to see that. They want the Google experience with the blank screen. When they get the search result, they just want the title and the call number so they can go to the stacks. So we've hidden so much information that I think there might even be a whole generation of people who don't realize the work that actually still goes into creating a bibliographic description and since they're able to go to Google and find things, they don't realize the intellectual work that goes into creating descriptions because -- and I think that's one way we've kind of shot ourselves in the foot, and we're having to make ourselves -- trying to make ourselves relevant now because we've hidden so much of that work. >> Beacher Wiggins: Yes. >> So I also work in the main reading room with Kathy, and somebody up there mentioned institutional memory. And Kathy had mentioned David Caminsky coming in and looking at our catalog in terms of library hand. It was fascinating because he was pretty sure he could identify which library school various catalogers had gone to based on the style of handwriting. It was amazing to me. But predays of cell phone cameras, we used to occasionally have to give people permission to take out the rod from the catalog and photocopy a catalog. And he had very good reason for needing to do that so we started to carefully take these apart. Kathy had mentioned it's a hodge podge of catalog cases and drawers and kinds of things, and I think we came up with five or six different methods to get the rods out, and one was really simple. You just unscrewed it, and another one had like a hidden button, but there are also keys. There are a couple of different kinds of ways of loosening the rod and Cheryl Adams inherited some of these keys when Sheridan Harvey retired, and we had to be around to get the keys or open the catalog, and I can't even remember how to do most of them. So we decided in terms of succession planning and institutional memory have a staff meeting. We needed to train some of our younger colleagues. So we brought in all the drawers and all the keys and taught everyone how to use them because it just doesn't come up very often, but when it does, you need to know how to open those drawers. >> Yeah, if I could add to that. Kay Giles and Tom Yee, I spoke with both of them when I was writing this book. And I forget which one but they told a story of there used to be back in the day staff members who would stand by the card catalogs when somebody pulled a rod out and knocked the whole drawer over and the cards would go everywhere. They were masters of quickly refiling the cards in the correct order and getting the rod back in there. >> Beacher Wiggins: There is a question there and here. >> Okay, I'm just curious about the workflow. Once MARK was being pushed in 1969 or 1970, not everybody was going to be doing the actual cataloging [inaudible] information. The catalog was still being typed up. What was the workflow -- that information was going to be inputted into a machine readable system and then -- in other words, what was the workflow? You had a book. Because [inaudible] was still being -- still being created, but you had MARK, which was machine readable. What was that kind of connection? >> Beacher Wiggins: Well, I'm going to speak from memory now because when I came in, I was cataloging, we were using cards. They weren't 3 by 5, but they were twice that so probably like 4 by 6. And so we catalogers typed information on that, and we had a separate division. MARK Editorial Division, I believe was its name at least in one [inaudible]. All of those cards, if you will, flowed to that division and there was staff who then did the keying into the system. That system generated information that produced the card -- the cards themselves that were done by at that time I think it was called the card distribution division I believe it was, and so everything flowed from catalogers starting with the input process, going through the creation process, the intellectual process then the input process and the MARK Editorial Division and format and structure, then that flowing on to the card distribution service and the card division. That was one iteration. Then it moved onto, we had [inaudible] terminals and we finally could actually input the data into something that had no intellectual understanding what was happening, was just sucking it in, going some place else and then that would spew out the end products. Then I think maybe by the 80's or 90's we each had intellectual desktops that actually took the things that we could then manipulate and do searching and all that kind of thing. So it was never [inaudible]. Sort of evolved at the same rate of the MARK format itself from print through probably the first decade of 15 years to the special format,sound recordings,cardiographic materials and what not. So that's a very high level way it flowed at that time here at the library. One more question so people can at least gather a little bit for the reception. >> Hi. Long before the MARK 2 project, there was a MARK pilot project, which was a completely different format. The tag was right next to the field itself. There was no director. Before even that, Henriette had contracted with Larry Bucklin at [inaudible] to do a study of this area and what the details were I cannot say at this point. >> Beacher Wiggins: Right. I had some of all that detail but I didn't want to go into it for this. I just wanted to keep it at a high level, but yes. Believe me, she told me about every one of those. And if I got it wrong, if I was trying to describe or write some article for her I knew it by the next day. So yes. There were lots of intricacies and they went to various pilot stages and recon projects and some of them got funded and evolved into something permanent and some went by the way. The ony thing that was constant was the constant evolution of the format itself. And more and more becoming engrained in the library world like what we're doing. On that then, we will end and in the -- >> Yeah, I want to thank a moment to thank all of our speakers. It was just a fabulous program. >> This has ben a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.