Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Two things: The sense memory, again; that satisfying "chunk" when you took a drawer out and put it on a table, and the feel of the index cards as you flipped through them. Oh, and one more -- seeing cards that went way back and were handwritten. The jumble was aesthetically pleasing.
The other was the serendipity of it, as you flipped through the cards you'd run across a book you'd never heard of, but was exactly the kind of thing you wanted to read.
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I worked in a college library that still had physical cards and I agree with all of this.
Don't get me wrong, I love the new tools we have, but I definitely benefited from the card catalog back in the day. I also appreciate that with the cards, there was never any record anywhere of what you had searched for.