The University of California Libraries: A Plan for Development (1977)

CHAPTER V
IDENTIFICATION AND LOCATION OF MATERIALS
From the standpoint of the user, the library's first significant
task is to provide him with the means of identifying the
materials he needs, or if these items are already known, to locate
them.
The Card Catalog. For the past century, the library's
principal method of doing this has been the card catalog. The
large cabinets with the 3 by 5 cards have been so ubiquitous that
to most users and librarians alike the catalog is the sine qua non
of librarianship. Yet today the card catalog is in trouble in most
large research libraries, and in fact has become an endangered
species. The New York Public Library closed its card catalog several
years ago, replacing it with a computer-produced book catalog,
and a number of other libraries, including the Library of Congress,
have announced plans to close their catalogs as well. In the University
of California, the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have
had a series of committees studying the desirability of a similar
step for the last several years.
There is, in short, a growing feeling that the card catalog
has become, in most large institutions, an unwieldy and ineffective
device. There are many reasons, but the main one is simply that
they have been around for so long, and that fact alone contributes
to their awkwardness and complexity. The Berkeley catalogs, for
example, were started in 1876, about the time other libraries
began to switch from the older, book-form catalogs. As was the custom,
the cards were painstakingly written out in "library hand,"
and some of these cards are still to be found in the catalogs. The
University Librarian at the time (Joseph C. Rowell) commented when
he first proposed the card catalog that "it has been suggested...
that use of the 'typewriter' be made in making the catalogue--if