美国国家公共电台 NPR File This Under Nostalgia: New Book Pays Tribute To The Library Card Catalog

 

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

David, you and I are old enough to remember card catalogs at the library, right?

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Three words - Dewey Decimal System.

MARTIN: Did you go to the library in college?

GREENE: Of course I went to the library...

MARTIN: OK.

GREENE: ...And spent time in (unintelligible) catalogs.

MARTIN: Anyway, so those old card catalogs are basically furniture - right? - big wooden cabinets with tiny drawers. These things are retro chic¹ now, people use them for all kinds of things - sewing supplies, snacks, shoes. Those tiny drawers are the analog² equivalent to Google. There's a new book about the history of the card catalog from the Library of Congress which gave NPR's Andrew Limbong, a great excuse to check out the archives.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE³: In a basement beneath the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., there's a wall that's lined with those wooden drawers containing index cards.

PETER DEVERAUX: There's tens of millions of cards here. This is a city block-long.

LIMBONG: That's Peter Deveraux who wrote the new book titled "The Card Catalog," and I'm also here with Carla Hayden. He's the librarian of Congress.

CARLA HAYDEN: OK. So let's explore.

LIMBONG: Highlights from the library's collection include Whitman comma Walt, "Leaves Of Grass," Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, also known as Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Margaret Mitchell, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, that Shakespeare guy and on and on and on - some handwritten, some typed with various cross-out marks and notes scribbled⁴ on the side.

Cataloguing has been around for as long as we humans had stuff to keep track of. Information isn't much good if you don't know where to find it. There is Sumerian catalogs of clay. The great catalog in the Library of Alexandria and ancient Egypt and then in the 14 and 1500s after Gutenberg invented the printing press, readers were freaking out. There was all this information coming out so rapidly. How could people keep track of it? Maybe you can relate to the feeling. Jump ahead a few hundred years after the French Revolution when the card catalogue as we know it was created.

HAYDEN: The card catalog was a way of managing this increase in material and what we have today is what people are calling a firehose of information and being able to catalogue or contain and make sense of all of this information is what the card catalogue represents.

LIMBONG: Now, today, the card catalog is nostalgia⁵. It really has been since the 1980s when card catalog started fading.

HAYDEN: As I travel around as a librarian, I have people of certain generations that remember fondly fingering the cards and the discovery of that and pulling out the drawers. It's like a cabinet of curiosities.

LIMBONG: Hayden pulls out a card for her favorite childhood book, "Bright April" by Marguerite De Angeli about a Girl Scout⁶ Brownie.

HAYDEN: And it was the first book that I saw that featured a young African-American Brownie, and I loved it.

LIMBONG: The card points Hayden to related books.

HAYDEN: If I was looking in the catalog at that time, I said what else did she write? And I would go and "The Door In A Wall" - oh, what's that about? And it tells you about the books, and this card - "The Door In A Wall" - says incidental music composed by Herb Davidson. I think oh, music, And I keep going. And then there's Ealon's "America" - oh, "A Quaker Girl" (ph) and "Gerald's Island." And that's - was the discovery in the process.

LIMBONG: Human brains want to make connections whether it's fingering through a card catalog or now scrolling⁷ down the screen of search results. The Library of Congress is working with universities and tech companies to create the next form of the card catalogue. It probably won't be little screens that fit inside tiny drawers. Andrew Limbong, NPR News.

1 chic   

n./adj.别致(的)，时髦(的)，讲究的

参考例句：

• She bought a chic little hat.她买了一顶别致的小帽子。
• The chic restaurant is patronized by many celebrities.这家时髦的饭店常有名人光顾。

2 analog   

n.类似物，模拟

参考例句：

• The analog signal contains high-frequency video information,which helps make up the picture.模拟信号包括有助于构成图像的高频视频信息。
• The analog computer measures continuously,without proceeding step by step.模拟计算机不是一步一步地进行，而是连续地进行量度。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 scribbled   

v.潦草的书写( scribble的过去式和过去分词 )；乱画；草草地写；匆匆记下

参考例句：

• She scribbled his phone number on a scrap of paper. 她把他的电话号码匆匆写在一张小纸片上。
• He scribbled a note to his sister before leaving. 临行前，他给妹妹草草写了一封短信。

5 nostalgia   

n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧

参考例句：

• He might be influenced by nostalgia for his happy youth.也许是对年轻时幸福时光的怀恋影响了他。
• I was filled with nostalgia by hearing my favourite old song.我听到这首喜爱的旧歌，心中充满了怀旧之情。

6 scout   

n.童子军，侦察员；v.侦察，搜索

参考例句：

• He was mistaken for an enemy scout and badly wounded.他被误认为是敌人的侦察兵，受了重伤。
• The scout made a stealthy approach to the enemy position.侦察兵偷偷地靠近敌军阵地。

7 scrolling   

n.卷[滚]动法，上下换行v.（电脑屏幕上）从上到下移动（资料等），卷页( scroll的现在分词 )；（似卷轴般）卷起；（像展开卷轴般地）将文字显示于屏幕

参考例句：

• Another important detail required by auto-scrolling is a time delay. 自动滚屏需要的另一个重要细节是时间延迟。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓
• In 2D visualization and drawing applications, vertical and horizontal scrolling are common. 在二维的可视化及绘图应用中，垂直和水平滚动非常普遍。 来自About Face 3交互设计精髓