#cardcatalog

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Been chipping away at this piece for a couple weeks in between personal stuff, freelance, and work. Here’s my mock cover art for one of my favorite scary books as a kid, Alvin Schwartz’s ” In A Dark, Dark Room & Other Scary Stories.” Its a book that is on the banned book list. I remember in elementary school, every year for Halloween I’d check this book out. I loved it so much. Still do even as…

Before there was HOLLIS, researchers used to find books in the Fine Arts Library by using the card catalog. Some of our staff remember them very well! Mary Jane Cuneo, senior serials cataloger who works on FAL materials, shared the following memory:

“I have to admit, I was there as a cataloger at the time of card catalogs. We typed subject headings on cards we had ordered from the Library of Congress, on a typewriter equipped with a card platen to hold the card steady; and used the red-ink part of the ribbon.

Students would interfile new cards “above the rod” and a supervisor would drop them after checking the filing by pulling out the rod and re-inserting it. To correct an error printed or typed on a card, we used a beast of a thing: the electric eraser. It was really heavy.

Also in our toolkit was a razor blade, to scrape and scratch away the unwanted text. When I started at the Fine Arts Library as a library assistant in 1976, this was part of my job. Truly amazing how far things have come!”

The first photograph dates from 1952 when our library was located within the Fogg Art Museum. The second photograph shows the card catalog for auction sales catalogs that we still have at the library. And the last image? An electric eraser.

Image description:

Image 1: A woman hunching over card catalogs on a pulled-out drawer of the card catalog cabinets. Card catalog cabinets stand against the wall on the right.

Image 2: Tinted photograph of a close-up view of card catalogs in the drawer.

Image 3: Photo of the electric eraser

Image 1: Fogg Art Museum. Interior, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Fine Arts Library. Visual Collections. Card catalog, photographed ca.1980s. Sculpture at left is Marino Marini's "Horse and Rider", 1952, from the Harvard Art Museum's collection  Author/Creator Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [architect] HOLLIS number: olvsite34738

Some views of the UGA Main Library, as captured by the film crew of the UGA Office of Public Relations/Public Affairs around 1967.

We especially appreciate this view of the 1960s furniture in the library. Recent renovations have brought some of that look back, especially in the 3rd Floor Graduate Reading Room, but it’s nice to see contemporary footage of how it really was.