273.
273. There are certain advantages claimed for page catalogues which may be enumerated here. The chief is that a large group of entries can be scanned with one sweep of the eye, thereby facilitating the rapid finding of any particular entry. Another is that, being in book form, it is more easily manipulated than other forms of catalogue. Its comparative cheapness is sometimes put forward as an advantage over other forms, particularly cards, but on this point it is not wise to assume cheapness where so much time and labour are necessarily involved. As regards the claim to rapidity in turning up entries because a whole page is exposed at a time, there are considerable doubts as to its soundness. General experience of such catalogues as the British Museum is that, owing to the number of entries, the occasional congestions and disorders where double columns of entries exist, it is more difficult to find a given entry than in the case of cards or slips properly guided and in accurate alphabetical order. This point may be further illustrated by the case of men or women who are not adepts at using alphabetical lists, and who turn up a particular word in a dictionary with much difficulty and loss of time.
Fig. 95.—Card Catalogue Cabinet with Sliding Extension Runners ([Section 275]).
274. Card Catalogues.
274. Card Catalogues.—The card-index is the invention of librarians, and is perhaps the most important contribution to method that commerce owes to them. Cards for library cataloguing purposes were used in France in the middle of the eighteenth century; they were used in Trinity College, Dublin, early in the nineteenth century; and in 1852 they were introduced into the Bank of England for commercial indexing. The plan of keeping cards or slips on edge in boxes or drawers loosely, thereby giving unlimited means of expansion and intercalation, must have occurred to many minds as the best means of maintaining perpetual alphabetical order. Single cards not attached in any way, save temporarily, possess unlimited powers of movability, and can be arranged in any kind of order when assembled in numbers, because each card can be taken away or moved about or fresh cards added at any point in a series, without upsetting any adjoining card, or interrupting alphabetical order.
The cards, when arranged in alphabetical order, are separated into small divisions by means of projecting guides, on which are printed subject or author or other words or class numbers, which serve the same purpose as the running catch-words of a dictionary, only they are much more effective, because more conspicuous. They are secured by means of a rod which passes through holes punched in the lower part of the cards, and the rod is either locked or screwed into the back or front of the drawer.
275.
275. The usual plan is to store the cards in the drawers of a cabinet, marking the contents of each drawer plainly on the outside. [Fig. 95] is an illustration of a card cabinet, showing the usual guides and sliding runners to enable the whole extent of a drawer to be pulled free of the cabinet for purposes of examination.