What We Take For Granted

 I chuckled over a post by Library Matters on Facebook the other day, which showed a young woman searching through a drawer in a card catalogue with the caption, "Prehistoric Googling" and couldn't resist sharing it, saying, "Oh yes, I remember it well, and contributed to many card catalogues."

For people under a certain age, here is an image of a card catalogue, from Wikimedia Commons:

Depending on the purpose of the library, there would usually be at least two sequences of cards: one arranged in subject order (classified), the other alphabetical by author. During the late seventies and for most of the eighties, I spent many happy hours producing catalogue cards and then filing them, so that my library's users could find the information they needed. The one I remember best was the card catalogue I maintained at the Library of the Chartered Institute of Transport. Not only did it contain details about books, but also a detailed index of journal articles, for all the journals to which CIT subscribed. Most of the morning during each working day was spent indexing, because if the subject of the article was a complex one, which they often were, each article would require several catalogue cards to index it adequately.

Well over thirty years have passed since I last contributed to a card catalogue. Since then, the information revolution has happened and they are redundant. (And it was already taking place during the eighties, when I stubbornly stuck to manual input, because computers scared me so much). Looking back from the vantage point of today, when almost everything is available online, it's hard to believe I spent so much time on them. These days, only one entry is required and the cross-references (all the extra "catalogue cards") are generated automatically.  Far less time consuming.

Yet I do not begrudge the hours I spent writing catalogue cards. In their time, they were invaluable to the Library's users and were, in their way, an efficient information retrieval system. Of course, online searching is far easier and can be done remotely, given access to any online catalogue. Whereas, in the old days, you had to be physically present in the library to find the information. 

It is too easy for organisations (including branches of government) to take it for granted that *everyone* has a smartphone these days and can therefore interact with the online world. But it ain't necessarily so. This was brilliantly illustrated by the film, I, Daniel Blake, which I blogged about here. I do sometimes worry about the minority of people who are unable to access online resources. Those who do not have a computer, or are unable to get to grips with using one. This is a problem which will become more and more rare as time passes, but at present, there is still a substantial minority of folk who don't have the IT skills to embrace our Information Age. They are excluded from so much because of this. To give just one example, our local GP practice now requires patients to complete an online form before accessing their services. And I do wonder how intimidating that is for some...

So I think we need to remember that not everyone is au fait with the online world and take the trouble to provide non-computerised alternatives.