Throwback Thursday!
This card sorter (from Gaylord) was used to sort catalog cards, first into smaller categories (like Dewey centuries or Library of Congress classes), and then those piles were sorted individually. In computer science, this is called a bucket sort. This particular card sorter has been modified to allow half-century buckets (e.g. 151-200 in one stack). We must have had a lot of cards to sort!
A treatise of the lawes of the forest : wherein is declared not onely those lawes, as they are now in force, but also the originall and beginning of forests : and what a forest is in his owne proper nature, and wherein the same doth differ from a chase, a parke, or a warren, with all such things as are incident or belonging thereunto, with their seuerall proper tearmes of art ; also a Treatise of the pourallee : declaring what pourallee is, how the same first began, what a pourallee man may do, how he may hunt and vse his owne pourallee, how farre he may pursue and follow after his chase, together with the limits and bounds, as well of the forest, as the pourallee : collected, as well out of the common lawes and statutes of this land, as also out of sundrie learned auncient authors, and out of the Assises of Pickering and Lancaster / by Iohn Manvvood ; whereunto are added the statutes of the forest, a Treatise of the seuerall offices of verderors, regardors, and foresters, & the Courts of Attachments, Swanimote, & Iustice seat of the Forest, and certaine principall Cases, Iudgements, and Entries of the Assises of Pickering and Lancaster: neuer heretofore printed for the publique. (OCLC #7955672)
In a modern computerized ILS, there is little marginal cost for each additional access point. In a card catalog however, each access point (title, authors, subjects, series) will be a heading on its own card in the catalog. If the title (and thus the record) is long enough to span multiple cards, each heading will also generate multiple cards!
This set of cards cut off nearly half the ISBD Area 1 paragraph (italicized above), including the full description only on the shelf list card.
On a shelf of old mysterious problems, I found four cardboard boxes of catalog cards. These were the shelf list and catalog for the sound recordings (on records and audio cassettes) in our media collection. I blew the dust off of the cards and packed them neatly into drawers in a nearby card catalog cabinet, which houses cards for similar collections.
Those cards poking up out of the right drawer are “see also” cards, like this one:
They are housed in plastic sleeves that make them stand up above the other cards.
The paternity of Abraham Lincoln; was he the son of Thomas Lincoln? An essay on the chastity of Nancy Hanks by William E. Barton. (OCLC #882677)
The form of Lincoln’s heading on the bottom card is the current one; the form on the top card has already been modified once by hand, but not quite to the current form – the original form on the top card is not even in the current authority record. It does have a link to a similar heading, United States. President (1861-1865 : Lincoln) describing that role, though it is not for use as a subject.
Maintaining consistent name authority is much easier and less error-prone with a modern ILS. Always control your headings in OCLC when you can to help this process!
What happened to all of those catalog cards when we started using an ILS?
For our Special Collections, we kept them. We are now making sure that all of the data from the stamps and hand-written notes are present in the (electronic) catalog before we forget what codes like “OCB” used to mean.