Time Capsule 25: the low-tech library

We Boomers laugh with a touch of bitterness at jokes about kids who have no idea how to find information without Google.

Some of the unpleasantness comes from remembering how much more effort it used to take doing research. How often did I have to race across the Green to Baker Library to check the fact on a lost note card, something needed in a term paper I was frantically typing? With a deadline.

This time capsule presents three antique library artifacts:

a card from an old card catalog

a book checkout record card

and a Date Due slip.

All three of these archaeological artifacts have disappeared from early 21^st century libraries. There are some old card catalogs stored in off-campus warehouses, but they will soon be in landfills.

I've used older library books that still have a stamped Date Due slip pasted on the inside of the back cover. As with the slip in the image above, no one has stamped a due date on them for 20 years.

Nowadays, libraries check out books by scanning bar codes pasted on the back or just inside the book cover. Libraries send me reminders by email or text message a couple of days before the books are due.

Also: do you remember our cardboard college library cards, and that little metal strip with embossed alphanumerics attached to it? When we checked out books, the clerk ran the checkout cards through an old-fashioned, carbon-copy "knuckle buster"credit card reader to print our info on the cards.

In the picture of the card above, which is from the 1940s, all the borrowers wrote in their names.

I'll never forget the thrill one day in Baker as I checked out a copy of Ricardo Güiraldes' novel Don Segundo Sombra for a literature class with Arturo Madrid.

The student whose name was written immediately above mine had borrowed the book 27 years earlier. It was Gregory Rabassa, '44, the magnificent translator of so much 20th century Latin American fiction. His name on the check out card was like a "George Washington Slept Here" plaque on an old building. The sense of proximity was very cool.

Now that the card catalogs are all gone, the books I look for are found in libraries' online catalogs, where they can be requested, and then picked up at convenient branch libraries.

The only thing still made of paper in libraries are the books themselves and the magazines on the reading room racks. Even so, more and more books and periodicals are available in electronic copies online. At this rate, the trees can stop worrying.

Today's Dartmouth students know what Beer Pong was —because it’s still played. But research in Baker Library the way we did it? Say whut…?

71s who studied sciences used specialized libraries around campus. Other majors used the Sanborn collection, and Carpenter had art library. But for me, research often began in the Subject trays of Baker’s card catalog.

Winter term '69, when I was trying to write about Don Quixote for Professor Crosby’s Spanish 25 Cervantes seminar, I probably started by finding the cards with the Subject: Spanish literature -- History and criticism and then by checking the  author cards: Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616.

Next stop was the yearly of the Modern Language Association’s Bibliography series to find the latest scholarly books and articles.

I’d take a stack of note cards with call numbers and volume/page numbers written on them into the stacks to find the books and bound journals. On the side of the card catalog cabinets, as you see in the 60s photo above, there was always a little cardboard box attached. It had golf pencils and small papers to write all this hard-to-remember info on.

A freshman ’27 would probably have no idea how to do any of this.

Now that I think about it, I might not remember well enough myself.

But Dartmouth libraries have always been evolving. Eleazar Wheelock's books were the original library, and as books were added, the library moved around campus, from smaller to larger building. and the Baker Library we used was quite different from the one that opened in 1928. The new library (built according to legend because a Boston sportswriter annoyed President Hopkins with a quip about Dartmouth being the only New England college with a gymnasium larger than the library) replaced Wilson Hall.

That ugly brick pile was dedicated in 1885, on the same day as Rollins Chapel. Its construction had been financed by a $50,000 gift from the estate of George Wilson, a Providence backing powder tycoon who had no connection with Dartmouth. His executor was a '58, and the bequest was made.

It was what is called a "closed stack library." That is, the collection was not open for browsing, and borrowers had to request books at a desk —not that different from the way the Reserve Room under the Orozco Murals worked in our day.

This is a photo of the Wilson Library staff in its stacks. The three of them fetched books requested by students to be borrowed.

In its 40 years as the college library, Wilson’s collection had grown from its original 60,000 books to almost 250,000. It was so catastrophically outgrown that books were stored all over campus, including the basement of New Hamp.

And all the book acquisitions continued to accumulate even after Baker opened in 1928 with its half-a-million book capacity. A Baker annex was built in 1941 to add space for another 500,000 books.

While we were students, there was a ceremony for the addition of the millionth book to the Dartmouth College Library. The pace picked up, and in just 24 years the library added its 2 millionth book. It’s up to over 3,500,000 volumes now.

Large increases in size and scale have always been disruptive, and they account for some of the library’s changes.

For all the centuries when libraries were small enough to fit in single rooms, a librarian could know where each scroll, manuscript, or codex was shelved. Prodigious catalogers like Callimachus in Alexandria whose Pinakes supposedly extended to 120 volumes were forced to systematize texts in some sort of system.

By the mid-19^th century, librarians were losing ability to keep track of the books in their exploding library collections. There were many different systems created to create inventories of books by subject, the most widely adopted being Melville Dewey’s, which we knew as the Dewey Decimal System.

Even so, the 200,000+ volumes in Wilson Library were cataloged in a makeshift shelf list.

If you look hard at the dark photo from 1919, you can see a small card catalog cabinet on the left side of the checkout desk in Wilson.

It wasn’t until Baker Library opened that the College Librarian, Nathaniel Goodrich, got funding for cataloging the collection according to the Dewey Decimal System. At last, students could go into the stacks and browse books arranged by subject.

Before organizing shelves according to subject, author, and title, books could only be accessed by librarians. A mistakenly shelved book became a needle in a haystack.

The opening of Baker Library and the implementation of the Dewey cataloging system were enormous changes.

But things didn't stand still and continued changing during our years. Besides that 1 millionth book, the Baker we used was in a decade-long process of switching to the new Library of Congress cataloging system. The older volumes about Spanish literature I checked out had call numbers beginning in the 860s. Newer ones were all to be found in the PQ shelves. There was an apartheid between the Dewey books from the Library of Congress ones.

The Dewey call numbers had been outgrown just as the space in Wilson Hall had.

And then the space for holding the already massive and rapidly expanding card catalog just ran out. After all, by 1969 the Library of Congress was printing 79 million catalog cards a year.

Computer-based catalogs using Henriette Arvum’s MARC system solved the problem of size and scale beginning in the 90s, and now, when you enter Baker Library by the front door and look around, the old card catalog we remember using is gone.

With the exponentially growing Internet, Google came along in 1998 with its algorithm to automate internet searching, something no human-based catalog could ever hope to accomplish.

If you want to find a book in the Dartmouth Library nowadays, you’ll need to access its online catalog.

BTW, there are no horses for hire on Allen Street either.

For more on the disappearance of the card catalog, see Nicholson Baker's famous complaint in the April 4, 1994 New Yorker ( https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1994-04-04/flipbook/064/ ) and the nice book by Peter Devereaux, The Card Catalog  (https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Card_Catalog/1zXeDQAAQBAJ?hl=en)

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