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Index are so beautiful 🥲
Technically, this is an index. YOU were the search engine.
Is it not a database?
“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”
And now I will leave for no raisin!
This looks like the backrooms
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!
naa. that guy and his system was kinda quite bigoted.
Library of Congress > Dewey Decimal all day every day 😜
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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.
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.
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.
This very much still exists in many libraries especially ones in Japan.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
*search index
Library catalog*
I wouldn’t mind if they brought this back.
