Card Catalog Bites the Dust

THERE'S A LOT MORE ELBOW ROOM in the Baker Library front lobby these days. Gone—after more than 70 yearsare the 32 cabinets that held more than 3 million index cards detailing the Dartmouth Library holdings. If you want to look up a book, you must now use a computer. The paper card catalog cabinets—which hadn't been updated since 1991, when the College switched to a comprehensive online Catalog—were finally removed from Baker lobby during summer renovations. Their contents were dumped and the wooden cases were sold.

The cabinets attracted buyers with a nostalgic bent. English major Erin Gooch'01 picked up a cabinet for $100. "The card catalogs are reminders of the magic that happens between the covers of a book, which e-books will never replace," she says.

Concurrent with the old systems removal was the unveiling of the Colleges latest iteration of the online catalog, which offers faster cross-reference capabilities while maintaining the previous system's more popular features, such as the ability to check a book's availability. "It gives much better indexed capabilities to find what's here," says new College Librarian Richard Lucier, who arrived last February from the University of California, where he was founding librarian of its digital library.

The new library catalog (at inno. dartmouth.edu) is the latest development of Dartmouth's online library listings. In 1979 the College launched one of the first online catalogs in the country. Since then, the system has grown to include citations for more than 2 million printed volumes, subscriptions to more than 20,000 journals and serials and various digital sources in the Colleges 11 libraries.

As for the newly vacant lobby, the high tables and stools sandwiched between the old card catalogs now stand alone. Lucier is appointing a committee to consider new uses for the space, with recommendations due this winter.