Extracted Annotations (24.12.2016 16:19:42)
\"The Paris Agreement requires that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission sources and sinks are balanced by the second half of this century. Because some nonzero sources are unavoidable, this leads to the abstract concept of \"negative emissions,\" the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through technical means. The Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) informing policy-makers assume the large-scale use of negative-emission technologies. If we rely on these and they are not deployed or are unsuccessful at removing CO2 from the atmosphere at the levels assumed, society will be locked into a high-temperature pathway.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:182)
\"Using the 76 scenarios consistent with a likely chance of not exceeding 2°C (see the figure), two key features are immediately striking. First, the scenarios assume that the large-scale rollout of negative-emission technologies is technically, economically, and socially viable (2, 4). In many scenarios, the level of negative emissions is comparable in size with the remaining carbon budget (see the figure) and is sufficient to bring global emissions to at least net zero in the second half of the century. Second, there is a large and growing deviation between actual emis-\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:182)
\"sion trends and emission scenarios. The sum of the national emission pledges submitted to the Paris negotiations (COP21) lead to an increase in emissions, at least until 2030. They thus broaden the division between pathways consistent with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement (5) and require either much more severe near-term mitigation (6) or additional future negative emissions.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:182)
\"Given such a pervasive and pivotal role of negative emissions in mitigation scenarios, their almost complete absence from climate policy discussions is disturbing and needs to be addressed urgently.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:182)
\"Bioenergy, combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), is the most prolific negative-emission technology included in IAMs and is used widely in emission scenarios. It has the distinct feature of providing energy while also, in principle (12), removing CO2 from the atmosphere.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"Despite the prevalence of BECCS in emission scenarios at a level much higher than afforestation, only one large-scale demonstration plant exists today.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"Other negative-emission technologies have not moved beyond theoretical studies or small-scale demonstrations. Alternative and adjusted agricultural practices, including biochar, may increase carbon uptake in soils (9). It may also be possible to use direct air capture to remove CO2 from the atmosphere via chemical reactions, with underground storage similar to CCS. Enhancing the natural weathering of minerals (rocks) may increase the amount of carbon stored in soils, land, or oceans. Introduction of biological or chemical catalysts may increase carbon uptake by the ocean.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"The allure of BECCS and other negative-emission technologies stems from their promise of much-reduced political and economic challenges today, compensated by anticipated technological advances tomorrow. Yet there are huge opportunities for near-term, rapid, and deep reductions today at little to modest costs, such as improving energy efficiency, encouraging low-carbon behaviors, and continued deployment of renewable energy technologies. Why, then, is BECCS used so prolifically in emission scenarios?\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"In postponing the need for rapid and immediate mitigation, BECCS licenses the ongoing combustion of fossil fuels while ostensibly fulfilling the Paris commitments.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"Two decades of research and pilot plants have struggled to demonstrate the technical and economic viability of power generation with CCS, even when combusting relatively homogeneous fossil fuels (14).\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"Moreover, the scale of biomass assumed in IAMs—typically, one to two times the area of India—raises profound questions (10) about carbon neutrality, land availability, competition with food production, and competing demands for bioenergy from the transport, heating, and industrial sectors. The logistics of collating and transporting vast quantities of bioenergy—equivalent to up to half of the total global primary energy consumption—is seldom addressed.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"BECCS thus remains a highly speculative technology.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"Its land-use impacts could include terrestrial species losses equivalent to, at least, a 2.8°C temperature rise (11), leading to difficult trade-offs between biodiversity loss and temperature rise.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"The promise of future and cost-optimal negative-emission technologies is more politically appealing than the prospect of developing policies to deliver rapid and deep mitigation now.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"Negative-emission technologies are not an insurance policy, but rather an unjust and high-stakes gamble.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
\"They could very reasonably be the subject of research, development, and potentially deployment, but the mitigation agenda should proceed on the premise that they will not work at scale. The implications of failing to do otherwise are a moral hazard par excellence.\" (Anderson and Peters 2016:183)
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\n\"sorting, addressing, controlling, storing, accounting, and computing? And since the terminology demands situating the card index in a media archeology that examines the universality of paper machines, the questions guiding this study follow the development of (preelectronic) data processing.\" (Markus :8)
\n\"This book seeks to map the three basic logical components of every computer onto the card catalog as a “ paper machine, ” analyzing its data processing and interfaces that may justify the claim, “ Card catalogs can do anything! ”\" (Markus :10)
\n\"Although the card catalog may appear rather insignificant next to the delicately imposing typewriter, it stubbornly claims its place by its promise of universality.\" (Markus :10)
\n\"The assertion of a universal paper machine (and a fi rst search for its origin and development) raises the suspicion that this apparatus has its model and predecessor in boxes of paper slips as used by libraries. The basic assumption is that the genealogy of the card catalog as a storage technology includes several technology transfers between discourses: that of the library and that of efficient management. The ubiquitous presence of the card catalog on desks between World War I and World War II owes to a shift of this concept from library to office.\" (Markus :10)
\n\"The method can be described as one that satisfies the basic operations of a universal discrete machine : storing, processing, and transferring data. 4 What differs here from other data storage (as in the medium of the codex book) is a simple and obvious principle: information is available on separate, uniform, and mobile carriers and can be further arranged and processed according to strict systems of order. This technology transfer harks back to a primal scene, even though at first it is limited to libraries and closely linked learned discourse. Polymath Konrad Gessner stands at the beginning of this history of the card catalog.\" (Markus :10)
\n\"rst card catalog in library history in Vienna around 1780. For the card catalog to become the librarian s answer to the threat of information overload, precise written instructions that can integrate untrained staff into the division of labor are decisive. Here, I also briefly digress and examine two coinciding addressing logics: In the same decade and in the same town, the origin of the card index cooccurs with the invention of the house number. This establishes the possibility of abstract representation of (and controlled access to) both texts and inhabitants.\" (Markus :11)
\n\"Part II, “ Around 1900, ” focuses on the discursive transfer between library and office, which does not emerge from European libraries. While the latter remain mired in the quarrel over cataloging versus classified shelf arrangement, the initiative is taken by the American Library Association (particularly by Melvil Dewey as a protagonist), kicking off a powerful technology transfer, described in chapter 6, between the institutions of knowledge management and those of business. Dewey s Library Bureau not only carries the aim of institutional transfer in its name, but soon develops from a one-man business to a significant corporation.\" (Markus :12)
\n\"Finally, in chapter 8, list-sorted management on an index card basis is coupled with the organizational discourse of scientific management, which discovers the card index as an economic optimization tool and develops it into an instrument of rationalization.\" (Markus :12)
\n\"However, as the task consists of tying together episodes involving an arrangement of paper slips and their respective links, I will allow index cards to lead the way. 7\" (Markus :13)
\n\"Nor is this study able to remedy a lack that Foucault proclaimed in a footnote: “ Appearance of the index card and development of the human sciences: another invention little celebrated by historians. ”1 0 Although one development, the “ make-up of the human sciences, ” serves as a methodological example for this book, a direct connection to the appearance of the index card could not be made unambiguously. The plan had been to fulfill the promise of that footnote and develop the transfer between librarians and businesspeople around 1890 in an appendix to the evolution of the index card. Yet this plan fell victim to lack of space.\" (Markus :13)
\n\"One more thing ought to be explained in advance: why the card index is indeed a paper machine. As we will see, card indexes not only possess all the basic logical elements of the universal discrete machine — they also fit a strict understanding of theoretical kinematics The possibility of rearranging its elements makes the card index a machine: if changing the position of a slip of paper and subsequently introducing it in another place means shifting other index cards, this process can be described as a chained mechanism. This “ starts moving when force is exerted on one of its movable parts, thus changing its position. What follows is mechanical work taking place under particular conditions. This is what we call a machine . ”1 1 The force taking effect is the user s hand. A book lacks this property of free motion, and owing to its rigid form it is not a paper machine.\" (Markus :14)
\n\"Even if it is clear that a card catalog does not perfectly resemble the digital calculator or computer, I maintain that the card catalog is one precursor of computing. 1 4 On the software side, the components of the catalog and its function correspond to the theoretical concept of a universal discrete machine as developed by Turing in 1936, with a writing/reading head (or scriptor), an infinite paper band partitioned into discrete steps (or slips), and an unambiguous set of instructions for reading and writing data. 1 5 Moreover, on the hardware side there is a line of industrial development from library technology directly to the producers of early computing installations, pointing to the technology transfer from the catalog card to the punch card and on to modern storage media.\" (Markus :15)
\n\"The explosion of written material after the introduction of the printing press brings a lot of attention to the library, which it did not garner in medieval times.\" (Markus :16)
\n\"In the medieval canon, the one book dominates the selection and reading of all other texts, so that the medieval library yields to the domination of biblical order and selection patterns; inventories comprise between a few dozen and a couple of hundred volumes, and it is merely for the sake of inventory control that they are listed. 4 Only when the library is inundated is the need to deal with all this material recognized.\" (Markus :16)
\n\"and mountaineer Konrad Gessner 5 (1516 – 1565) publishes the Bibliotheca Universalis the first two of three planned volumes come out in Zurich in 1545 and 1548 — taken up here only in terms of library innovation.\" (Markus :16)
\n\"Gessner, however, examines every single book meticulously to gather complete specifications of format, title, authors (provided they are named or discoverable), place of publication, and year of publication. 7 Then he appends a content description. Hence, Konrad Gessner can rightly count as the father of the modern bibliography. 8\" (Markus :17)
\n\"Chapter headings are recorded for use as locos communes . This procedure suggests that one may understand the Bibliotheca Universalis itself as an index of indexes. The processing of excerpts follows the simplest algorithm: 1. When reading, everything of importance and whatever appears useful should be copied onto a good sheet of paper. 2. A new line should be used for every idea. 3. “ Finally, cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors; arrange the slips as you desire, first into larger clusters which can then be subdivided again as often as necessary. ”2 1 4. As soon as the desired order is produced, arranged, and sorted on tables or in small boxes, it should be fixed or copied directly. 2 2 Fixing the mobile paper scraps on a sheet means fastening them with glue. This method of attachment, though, should always allow rearrangement, either by use of a water-soluble glue or by some system allowing easy subsequent insertions and shifts. This method requires a special type of book with a guiding thread.\" (Markus :20)
\n\"This procedure describes a hybrid card catalog in book form. And it is by no means pure theory;\" (Markus :20)
\n\"Behind this order of paper slips that guarantees mobility and rearrangement, one can recognize the same economy of signs that a century earlier contributes to a major paradigmatic shift. Johannes Gutenberg s invention of the printing press not only forges most obviously associations of typesetting, steel models, pouring mechanisms for individual letter types, special alloys, and composing sticks for setting lines of type. 2 8 As a marginal yet indispensable aid, a new tool for filing and storing of the individual pieces of type is introduced: the type case\" (Markus :21)
\n\"Whether for the production of catalogs or as building blocks for learned excerpts, the carefully stored slips of paper allow long-lasting use. For both type case and card catalog, it is essential to keep the respective materials in a flexible form so as to enable the creation of ever new and different arrangements. This “ method of generating indexes in the shortest time and in the best order ”3 1 is the earliest explicit description of how to store what one has read and found worth keeping, arranging it in different ways, and keeping it thematically retrievable\" (Markus :23)
\n\"It is an important fact that the Bibliotheca Universalis addresses a dual audience with this technology of indexing: on the one hand, it aims at librarians with its extensive and far-reaching bibliography; on the other hand, it goes to didactic lengths to instruct young scholars in the proper organization of their studies, that is, keeping excerpted material in useful order.\" (Markus :23)
\n\"Our lively survey of the early history of the scholar s box of paper slips may be summarized as classification systems using both software, meaning the question of what principles can order scientific and library data, and hardware, meaning long-term storage devices: (1) the book (Gessner); (2) the nearly immobile, heavy piece of furniture, as yet unnamed, but, as figure 2.6 clearly shows, a kind of card index cabinet (Placcius); and (3) the loosely sorted pile of papers on a table, at times filed in envelopes (Jungius).\" (Markus :27)
\n\"Leibniz proves circumspect when first hired in Hannover, and later as librarian at the famous Baroque library of Wolfenb \" ttel, in the completion of the cataloging projects he is entrusted with. 5 0 Between 1691 and 1699, again following Gessner s procedures, he lists the extensive holdings of the Wolfenb \" ttel library with the aid of two secretaries writing, an assistant cutting, sorting, and gluing, and two theology students copying: a directory that was to remain, into the twentieth century, the only general author catalog of the Duke August Library. 5 1\" (Markus :28)
\n\"Nevertheless, at the beginning of the eighteenth century it is by no means self-evident that a library should own a directory of its holdings. To find a book on a certain subject, one usually follows the classified shelving of books. At the outset of his library activity in Wolfenb \" ttel, Leibniz sketches a detailed plan, aiming to tackle the pitiful mess this famous collection is in. For a library without a catalog, as Leibniz put it in his Consilium resembles the warehouse of a businessman who cannot keep stock. 5 6 If the purpose of a businessman is garnering profits from his products, deploying certain technologies such as double-entry accounting, the comparison concedes that a library full of books remains worthless as long as it does not maintain a single book about these books.\" (Markus :29)
\n\"Thanks to internal mobility, or the permanent potential for reordering, the index catalog emancipates the order of the library from its physical shelving locations.\" (Markus :30)
\n\"What remains pivotal, however, is the relation between index and book, which implies both temporary and permanent cataloging. For in contrast to the fixed entries of a continuous list on sequentially linear pages, paper slips can be reconfigured as freely mobile units in ever new arrangements. A slip of paper serves as a first pointer, which refers with the help of a call number to an address, the place the text occupies on a shelf. However, it not only points to the location where a text is found — it also embodies a highly compressed data set that characterizes the book to be found. Ideally, the slip of paper contains not only complete bibliographical specifications (with detailed title, subtitle, authors, etc.), but also a short content key. Thus, it delivers a derivative of the text it represents.\" (Markus :30)
\n\"The slips of paper in the catalogs become a derivative of the registered writings, the interest rate of amassed capital. The higher the magnitude of indexing, the greater the later yields, in the form of ever new texts resulting from texts thus made accessible. The library becomes a bearer of capital, a data bank, lending information as if it were credit. The latter is reliably paid back in the indexing of new writings, whose contents in turn feed on the old ones.\" (Markus :31)
\n\"On Christmas Eve, 1770, a court decree by Her Majesty Maria Theresa goes out to the mayor of Vienna, ordering him to “ make the numbers on all houses legible and visible, on punishment of 9fl. ”1 This refers to the so-called conscription numbers that serve to simplify the registration of the male population of Vienna so as to include all possible conscripts.\" (Markus :34)
\n\"Owing to the lack of a more thorough addressing logic, places are accessed thanks to the systematic arrangement of laborers — that is, the crafts and guilds distributed throughout the neighborhood.\" (Markus :35)
\n\"Just as the conscription number is aimed at establishing the possible location of a respective recruit, so the call number of a book ideally carries the address of its regular storage place. Hence, it is hardly surprising that more recent library management uses the postal analogy of efficient addressing when it attempts to circumscribe the heterogeneous and often contradictory history of the development of call number systems. 1 2\" (Markus :36)
\n\"To diminish these occasionally unavoidable disturbances to order and to limit access to trained librarians who can provide readers with the desired books, a new type of mobile management becomes necessary in turn: reference management that finds books no longer via their location on the shelves, but via their systemic place in an alphabetical or subject catalog.\" (Markus :36)
\n\"However, what happens immediately is that the shift from tracking books on shelves to searching for their representation by bibliographical title copies also marks a shift in library order, a fundamental shift in its inner structure and architecture, and in directors plans for the logistical design of book storage. 1\" (Markus :36)
\n\"More pivotal than the inevitable reorganization is the step that replaces subject shelving with the systematic representation of books in a complete catalog. Library apprenticeships and library histories tend to sum up this disparate development rather laconically.\" (Markus :37)
\n\"Hence, the question of where to find which book is no longer directed toward a particular shelf; rather, it is directed to the symbolic order of the catalog. Thus, the need for a mobile (and adaptable) systems is moved to the catalog itself. “ To achieve the purpose of the call number — namely, to prevent misplacing a book — books must be equipped on the inside and the outside with the individual address, which is also noted in the catalog. ”\" (Markus :37)
\n\"This is how mechanical shelving replaces local shelving call numbers, positioning books by their numerus currens on the shelf. In the Viennese university library, reopened in 1777, instructions for arranging the “ treasury of knowledge ” (Leibniz) advise installing books according to a “ systematic plan of the sciences, and consequently according to the future library sections, ” so that every book can be found by means of the code Roman numeral / Roman letter / Arabic numeral (for example XIV.B.12). 2 0\" (Markus :37)
\n\"It is not suffi cient to furnish the library with catalogs by decree. Rather, detailed and exact written procedures are needed to guarantee the logistical architecture of the library beyond the fluctuations of a term of office. Faced with data streams whose sources make mobility necessary, the logic of search progresses from an approximate system — walking along the shelves (as if in a parade of books) — to specifi c access via the catalog.\" (Markus :39)
\n\"However, the narrow coupling of shelving and Enlightenment (which demands an academically differentiated access to the knowledge of the library) reaches a high degree of complexity with the classification system sketched by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his 1680 proposal for a universal library — not to neglect influential precursors in the scholarly system, including Gabriel Naud é 3 1 In contrast to the philosophical encyclopedic systems ruling at that time, he recommends shelving books according to systematic concepts, ordered by academic fields and arranged according to current interests. 3 2 There are numerous competing systems in the eighteenth century, although few designs take the diversifying of the sciences into account, thus proving incapable of integrating new branches of knowledge\" (Markus :39)
\n\"“ Dictatorial power of the catalogs over books ” takes hold only at the end of the age of Enlightenment, at the beginning of the Napoleonic age, and as a consequence of the French Revolution. 3 4\" (Markus :40)
\n\"In 1775, the Acad é mie des Sciences in Paris appoints Abb é Fran ç ois Rozier to tabulate an index of everything the academy published between 1666 and 1770 and to draw up a general index. Rozier chances upon the labor-saving idea of producing catalogs according to Gessner s procedures — that is, transferring titles onto one side of a piece of paper before copying them into tabular form. Yet he optimizes this process by dint of a small refinement, with regard to the paper itself: instead of copying data onto specially cut octavo sheets, he uses uniformly and precisely cut paper whose ordinary purpose obeys the contingent pleasure of being shuffl ed, ordered, and exchanged: “ cartes à jouer. ”3 5 In sticking strictly to the playing card sizes available in prerevolutionary France (either 83 × 43 mm or 70 × 43 mm), Rozier cast his bibliographical specifications into a standardized and therefore easily handled format.\" (Markus :40)
\n\"The undertaking that begins on May 22, 1780, later to be called the Josephinian catalog , is extant in “ 205 small boxes ” in an airtight locker in the\" (Markus :45)
\n\"Austrian National Library; it is widely, and often proudly, considered the first card catalog in library history. 7 4 Before we ask whether this is accurate, let us compare the process with Konrad Gessner s method. Three aspects distinguish the Josephinian catalog from the paper slip techniques practiced since early modern times: written instructions for the cataloger, a division of labor organized around interfaces, and the duration of catalog use. Only the coincidence of these three characteristic features and their mutual dependence separate the enterprise specifically from prior attempts, such as the refi nement of the Wolfenb \" ttel catalog under Leibniz, or Rozier s excellent index based on playing cards. Because of the constantly growing number of volumes, and to minimize coordination issues, Gottfried van Swieten emphasizes a set of instructions for registering all the books of the court library. Written instructions are by no means common prior to the end of the eighteenth century. Until then, cataloging takes place under the supervision of a librarian who instructs scriptors orally, pointing out problems and corrections as everyone goes along. 7 5\" (Markus :46)
\n\"In the end, the Josephinian catalog represents the entire library on approximately 300,000 cards, including a distinctive reference system — successfully meeting the first partial goal of registering all titles.\" (Markus :48)
\n\"Despite a deepseated distrust for the loose order of paper slips that threaten to flutter about with every gust of wind, 8 9 the court library staff does not copy the loose elements into the paradigmatic bound catalog in book form. The question remains of how long it would take to incorporate every library slip made since Konrad Gessner. How much time must pass to abolish the stigma of unavoidable loss of order before the new status of fluid harmony might be reached? A merely interim solution unexpectedly gets a chance to prove itself, before the index card is recognized and respected enough to establish itself in the catalog room. By 1912, when the struggle over catalog forms is by no means won, Fritz Milkau, an opponent of the indexical representation of books in the catalog and an ardent advocate of subject-classified shelving, denounces the apparatus of the card index as an “ embarrassment. ”9 0 Around 1780, nothing points to the fact that the Josephinian catalog will be implemented as an actual search engine or storage representation. A cautious surmise by Gottfried van Swieten, in his general report of 1787, indicates warily that it is not feasible to catalog the oppressive mass of books — in the shape of either an alphabetical or a subject catalog. In his report on the catalog project from 1780/1781, he reflects on it as “ an enterprise of major dimensions and effort — the materials alone fill 205 small boxes which, once processed, will bring forth a catalog of an estimated 50 to 60 folio volumes. ”9 1 The inability to carry out this ambitious plan results in the extended temporary use of the index cards. Instead of producing the book of books, the Bible of all libraries, as prescribed by every routine and library practice to date, one boldly keeps the bibliography divided into discrete miniature bibliographies.\" (Markus :49)
\n\"Entrusted with equipping the university library, the director of the theological faculty, Benedictine abbot Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch (1734 – 1785),9 4 devotes himself to the production of a “ Catalogo Topographico, ” following the principle of using it as a basis for all other catalogs, “ composed only of tiny slips of paper that could afterward be transferred as needed to any other catalog. ” 9 5\" (Markus :50)
\n\"While Adam Bartsch s instructions apply only to the Josephinian catalog project, Rautenstrauch s regulations are free of the idiosyncrasies of the court library and can apply to all university and school libraries in Austria. Thus, they become an imperial standard for catalogs, over thirteen years before the regulation generally cited as the first of its kind, whose rules for description have more than local validity, extending to all parts of France: the efforts to create a French national bibliography in 1791. 9 9 While index cards in the court library unexpectedly turn into permanent equipment, the librarians of the university and elsewhere faithfully copy the order imposed by the basic catalog into an alphabetically ordered, bound catalog. In the case of the Viennese university library the result, including supplementary volumes, encompasses the entire inventory by 1810. 1 00 In the course of this thirty-year project, the fundamental paper slip principle continually proves itself feasible, so that finally, the basic catalog is not destroyed, but maintained. 1 01\" (Markus :51)
\n\"In 1823, Johann Wilhelm Ridler fi nally declares the card index the indispensable basis for cataloging.\" (Markus :52)
\n\"A lot disappears with the departure of the ancien r é gime, and yet Abb é Rozier s idea gains entrance into revolutionary legislation with playful ease. The French book flood crests on November 2, 1789, after the National Assembly decides to declare all clerical goods national property, including the book collections of the church. 1 06 These confiscations require finding a way to tell the nation what belongs to the nation. General stocktaking begins in 1790, stopping a sell-off of the books — mostly for the mere price of paper — and keeping them in public libraries. On October 16, 1790, a committee is formed that devotes itself twice a week exclusively to the question of the mobile goods of the church, particularly what to do with books and art. The result appears in the form of a set of instructions on how library catalogs should be generated from now on. 1 07\" (Markus :52)
\n\"The work of the Bureau de Bibliographie, set up carefully in the Louvre, progresses rapidly and owing to the unexpected arrival of abundant new material is soon reinforced by more helpers. Numerous new employees are hired for an ever more differentiated division of labor, and soon enough, forty-three people are at work on the national bibliography. However, initial hopes for success flag over the course of sorting and processing — by 1794, at least 1.2 million cards record 3 million volumes. By no means all of the over 10 million works suspected to exist in the country ever reach Paris; only about 4 million are recorded on playing cards. Many d é partements either send slips with faulty specifi cations, or bound catalogs, or nothing at all. 1 12 In the end, not a single volume of the planned national bibliography is printed on the basis of playing cards.\" (Markus :54)
\n\"Thus, in France the card index does not establish itself as a permanent search engine and user catalog before the mid twentieth century. However, as a catalog-technical innovation, the standardized form — that have been so happily reassembled centrally — undoubtedly takes hold. The switch to a uniform format for the description of all the nation s books, the change to agreed standards for cataloging on cards, remains a lasting heritage of the French Revolution. In that respect, the approach marks an impulse in the history of cataloging and the storage of knowledge. It is a matter not just of é galit é instead of diversit é nor of the materiality of data carriers (paper versus cardboard), but above all of their arrangement the insurgent paper is emancipated from the continuous ream and elevated to the precisely cut, standardized dimensions of the index card. In fact, the French Revolution brings about the transformation of the paper slip to the index card by virtue of material equality.\" (Markus :54)
\n\"The second half of the eighteenth century witnesses trends that help to dissolve this narrow coupling of librarian and scholar. Two lines of development emerge, differentiating formerly closely related functions. One points directly to the education of professional librarians, who regard the production of indexes as an inherent part of their occupation. A second path already gained considerable attention in the course of the seventeenth century — namely, an aesthetic of learned production, the active discussion of principles for ordering excerpts. 1 This chapter will trace the divergence and increasing disparity of the two indexical situations, leaving aside for now the library and its cataloging rooms in the late eighteenth century, in order to turn to the arrangement of the material in the solitary scholar s study. The chapter proposes a genealogy that ranges from liberal praise for assembling excerpts (J. J. Moser), to the poetic and poetological extension of the technique (J. P . F . Richter), and to its peculiar culminating in its characteristic silence (G. W. F . Hegel).\" (Markus :56)
\n\"No doubt the task of a library catalog consists in referring to all addresses of available books in as complete and logically consistent an order as is feasible at any given time. 2 Questions to the catalog — whether asked by the mediating librarian or later by readers themselves — customarily comply with this general schematized form: whether and where a text is found (author catalog), or which text can be found in the stacks (subject catalog). Thus, the catalog may be expected to be able to answer if the pattern is followed, regardless of how peculiar a query might be. In other words, the library catalog serves as a collective search engine ( figure 4.1 ). Its data input comes from numerous sources, but it always works in accordance with strictly regulated instructions, so that it can be queried by anyone. In media theory terms: the communication structure of a collective search engine obeys a “ network dialog. ” 3\" (Markus :57)
\n\"The difference between the collective search engine and the learned box of paper slips lies in its contingency, and the resulting possibility that queries in one s own terms can be posed to the strange arrangement. While a search engine is designed to register everything randomly, the scholar s machine makes the determination whether or not to record a piece of information. This power of selection defines its idiosyncrasy.\" (Markus :57)
\n\"common professional service as a librarian (as it occurs for example in Wolfenb \" ttel in the transition from Leibniz to Lessing and their respective activities), the author also necessarily withdraws from access to the library. His formerly direct control over masses of books wanes and becomes the domain and occupation of librarians. Scholars are forced to compile personal catalogs after their own fashion to organize notes and excerpts.\" (Markus :58)
\n\"The catalog functions not as a mnemonic device for writings lost in storage, but merely as a formal representational structure — namely, an interface.\" (Markus :59)
\n\"By contrast, the scholar s machine allows two different applications. First, it serves as a memory aid. 8 Bit by bit, it receives excerpted materials in order to fix them in a suitable place. Faithful to the adage that stored means forgotten it offers an arrangement against the irreparable loss of the addresses that in turn point at content. 9 The second, more serious application moves the scholar s machine fully into the position of textual production. For it not only reliably reproduces everything the scholar gradually invested in it, recalling the extended present back to the time when each entry was made. Provided that the scholar knew how to tie new material together with the existing stock of excerpts, and marked connections and associations to similar texts and themes, the scholar s machine as a text generator delivers these very connections by branching out into forgotten memories as virtually new, served up as well as unexpected connections. The apparently insignificant, but regularly marked cross-reference yields rich profi ts when its recombinatory linkages enrich the power of the excerpts with chains of references. 1 0 As a result of unilateral liberation from the bound book, freely interconnected slips of paper expand the intersections and so increase the connectivity of possible relationships. Thus, the material of the scholar s machine awaits skilled interrogation in the shape of addressable aggregations of paper slips kept in appropriate boxes. The first bureaucratic order of 1495 under Maximilian I already recommends the use of partitioned cabinets as storage places for files. 1 1\" (Markus :59)
\n\"Dancing master Aubin, by profession a teacher of movement, advises his students to “ at the same time read\" (Markus :61)
\n\"a lot and remember a lot, ” yet recommends, counter to the eightfold advantages of thinking in boxes , the use of notebooks. 2 4 This recommendation disturbs the consistent line of genealogy that directly links Jean Paul s poetological materiality to the creation of the physical arrangement of scholarly boxes. In addition, research on Jean Paul has delivered unequivocal evidence that Moser s procedures were in fact eclipsed by the use of notebooks. 2 5 Nonetheless, poetic and scholarly production are reunited in the question of how to work with the assembled excerpts\" (Markus :62)
\n\"In 1785, when Hegel is fifteen years old and still in secondary school, he diligently begins to inscribe loose sheets of paper with excerpts. 3 4 In 1785, Johann Jacob Moser dies in Stuttgart, leaving behind, besides his boxes of index cards, his instructions on how to build a replica of his system. 3 5 Just as Jean Paul began his collection of excerpts at age fifteen in 1778, so it seems reasonable to count Hegel among the Swabian filiation of the readership of Moser s autobiography. 3 6 Hegel maintains this proven production principle throughout his life, though making, as Friedrich Kittler observes, one decisive and far-reaching change. The reformulation of excerpts into new texts transforms the copyist into an artist. In Hegel s Phenomenology of Spirit , the absolute spirit appears as a “ hidden box of index cards, ” because his excerpted foundation vanishes in the unstated erasure of references. 3 7\" (Markus :64)
\n\"Heine s citation refers not by accident to the connection between quotations and means of payment, both kept in ways that suggest an analogy between a banknote and an index card. For the circulation of representations of money and thoughts obeys the same structural model of substitution, supported by notes to which in fact the same name is applicable.\" (Markus :65)
\n\"These anonymous slips of paper are not yet money in the proper sense (legal tender), but merely a promise to respective owners to render cash upon submission of the slip of paper — the registered equivalent in gold or silver. This practice has its origin in England around the middle of the seventeenth century. It was not least the ongoing civil war that made wealthy people entrust goldsmiths and moneychangers with their capital for safekeeping. As vouchers, they receive so-called goldsmith s or banker s notes (see figure 4.2 for a modern version), which guarantee return upon demand. 4 1 As this system proves itself trustworthy, it gradually spreads, institutionalizing itself in banks that henceforth deal not so much in gold as in exchanges of paper. For the direct redemption of banknotes for cash allows the carrier (entitled to possession without producing any proof of ownership) to transfer the voucher to others.\" (Markus :65)
\n\"Using the comparatively valueless paper as a representation of value simplifi es payments owing to easy transport and anonymous transfer. Moreover, banknotes offer the chance to add value. The promise to exchange paper for money is hardly ever going to be made good for all holders of paper at the same time. That is why a bank can hand out more slips of paper than it actually holds in precious metal. The capital thus gained can be deployed elsewhere. In contrast to legal deposits, freely circulating slips of paper earn no interest. Nevertheless, just like their relatives from the bibliographical apparatus of library catalogs, the slips of paper allow an increase of capital without being able to bear interest independently. Only their number determines the degree of possible profit: numerous slips of paper increase the monetary as well as intellectual yield gained by the institution called bank or library. A bank hoards capital, a library hoards books. Both are united in the desire to increase deposits and to enhance what is achieved in processing money and writing by means of circulating paper slips. This is the decisive innovation for business conducted on the basis of paper slips: it is no longer the value itself that circulates (which is why the banknote does not count as money before the centralization of banks and\" (Markus :66)
\n\"the state monopoly on printing paper money), but only a substitute in the form of a written guarantee; what is exchanged is a plausible guarantee by a private bank that the holder will receive the equivalent of the paper on demand. This form of representing capital — by nothing but characters and figures that remain mobile in their materiality as paper units — resembles the structure that links bibliographical slips of paper with the books they refer to. 4 2 Ever since the extensive cataloging project in Vienna in 1780, it is the mobility of the card index that maintains access and thus the business of reading (and the subsequent processing of reading into new writing) under the conditions whereby huge numbers of books come into ever larger libraries. The historical coincidence of card catalogs with the gradual success of banknotes around 1800 as freely floating means of payment appears to be more than a mere historical contingency. 4 3 However, to uphold the representation between a slip of paper and capital at every moment, one essential condition must be fulfilled: banknotes must be covered, the money backing them up must exist.\" (Markus :67)
\n\"As a result of repeatedly failed attempts to lend banknotes the status of a stable currency and to strengthen the integrity of paper as money, banknotes were in bad repute. Alongside the honest efforts to set up paper banks as reliable institutions, numerous shady profiteers exploited the insuffi cient laws regulating private bank by spending more and more promissory notes without having secured their coverage, and in the short term greatly enriching themselves. Before any redemptions could be initiated, the bank was dissolved, and its operating authority as well as its capital disappeared without a trace. 4 6 Analogous doubts are deeply rooted in the librarian realm. Increasing admonitions point toward the fleeting nature of paper slips and their lack of reliability.\" (Markus :67)
\n\"Despite the skepticism that persists until the establishment of nationstates and state-guaranteed national currencies, payment with banknotes retains an essential advantage compared to payment with coins or gold: joint stockholders, as owners of the bank, profit from the promissory note system, and the depositors profit from interest earned, while the holders of banknotes must renounce interest. “ The holders of the notes received no pecuniary yield for holding banknotes. Apparently they used only the fungibility of the paper slip. Yet only they possessed wealth with the highest possible degree of liquidity. ”4 9 Only this liquidity, the comfortable ability to let capital flow, empowers fi nancial control within a system of economic exchange.\" (Markus :68)
\n\"Library access to books is simplifi ed and considerably increased — no time is wasted copying bound catalogs that limit the up-to-dateness of references. For readers in search of material for their subsequent activity as authors, this mode of liquification and fragmentation allows them to quote more easily — faithful to Montaigne s motto to “ let others say what I can say less well ” — to add quotations to their own collections and assemble them into new texts according to Moser s technique of weaving. 5 2\" (Markus :68)
\n\"Even today, access to written sources is granted by thoughtfully cultivated databases. Yet other paths lead to the sources of wealth. For the current card bank of the sciences is not only a database of electronic references to books. Also on call are citation indexes , databases that indicate the frequency of references, that is, how often someone has been quoted and by whom. 5 3 This special mode of accumulating cultural capital delivers indicators and measures for another form of value added and hints at the current market value of an author, thus providing guidelines for future speaking fees, consulting honoraria, or tenure negotiations. 5 4\" (Markus :69)
\n\"In their time, men like Moser could proudly refer to their index cards as a text-generating technology, contributing to the Enlightenment with an almost uncanny production rate. Yet around 1800, with the blossoming of the European idea of genius, this light dims, and production aesthetics undergo a fundamental change. From now on, painstakingly produced drafts go unmentioned, veiling the writing process in the darkness of a productive sleep. 5 8 Darkness keenly protects the trade secret of textual genius.\" (Markus :69)
\n\"While the point of the scholar s machine around 1800 is to make its own discursivity disappear, the exact reversal of this reticence occurs with the gradual establishment of the card index. Despite harsh criticism, 6 0 book collections give cause for pride, reemphasizing the technical basis of literary production. The effective enforcement of modern storage systems in the course of the nineteenth century also allows the index card to celebrate its return as a literary and scholarly text generator, possibly enhancing the life of many a mediocre author. 6 1\" (Markus :70)
\n\"In isolation, every index card is in peril of becoming a data corpse; to live, it must enter into relations with the remaining content. Thus, what single slips of paper require is cross-referencing. For only by means of cross-references do the disparate single entries, fed in at different times, constitute a web of evident relations, whether consciously drawn by the user or unconsciously put together by the machine.\" (Markus :70)
\n\"As soon as one regularly cross-references new input with older material, the index database blazes associative trails that may serve as clarifying creative prompts for different connections and unexpected arguments.\" (Markus :70)
\n\"“ The box of index cards yields combinatory possibilities that can never have been planned, anticipated, or conceived that way. ”6 4 Consequently, surprises pop up, thanks to an unexpected reference to aspects not previously considered. So how does one furnish a box of index cards with the ability to surprise? Only over time, time being the feature that enables complicated structures to develop. These will emerge under the condition that the user consistently feeds the system with information — namely, in the shape of text modules, facts, fragments of thought, longer excerpts, even complete arguments, always binding them into the existing reference structure.\" (Markus :71)
\n\"potential states of knowledge that are merely actualized by the user at a given time in certain combinations — when they are called up. “ The text knows more than its author, ” as one of the basic assumptions of philology has it. One could transfer this statement easily to the relation between boxes of index cards and their users. Text fragments held at the ready by the apparatus in their potential connectivity offer incomparably more connection points than the user is aware of at any given moment. Thus, the interface offers a range of possible connections, and along with them it delivers potentially new lines of argumentation. Storing states of knowledge and (via their contacts with the interface) helping to catalyze future thoughts, index cards know more than their author.\" (Markus :74)
\n\"One might say that the communication between database and user is purely theoretical, in the etymological sense of the word theoria “ view. ” For the boxes of paper slips allow their user an instant view, an overview of possible constellations or different arguments. The variety of the slips of paper opens a perspective onto different possible considerations at the same time, allowing one to see various mental constellations in their contingency. Theory is nothing else, at least in etymological terms. It is up to the users to commit themselves to a view, to select lines of argument or readings according to scientific practice as the basis of their own textual production.\" (Markus :74)
\n\"How, then, does the library card index reach the New World, and how does it also develop into a card index system for business use? On the one hand, American librarians travel around Europe throughout the first half of the nineteenth century to study — and later to import — library technologies for their own, rapidly developing libraries, particularly in New England.\" (Markus :76)
\n\"However, this technology transfer between Old and New World relinquishes its European roots all too soon, and the paper slip system is soon claimed as a home-grown method. Yet this repression was unnecessary, for North American library history can lay claim to its own developments in matters of efficient cataloging. What follows is a reconstruction (from the archives at Harvard) of the independent “ invention ” of an old European paper slip technique in the New World.\" (Markus :76)
\n\"However, the gradual waning of bibliographical productivity is accompanied by a noteworthy process, and one that — albeit joyless for Croswell and his supervisor, Harvard College president John Thornton Kirkland — will result in a major achievement for American information management technology. William Croswell endows the largest library of his country and his time with a paper slip catalog that, as a prototype of the card index, will find its way into the offices and management systems of the prospering economy around 1900.\" (Markus :77)
\n\"He recognizes the need to accelerate his work and tries to find the easiest method that will lead quickly and efficiently to results. What would make more sense than to bring existing material into a new form by cutting it up and rearranging it?\" (Markus :80)
\n\"After Charles Folsom s reign in the library, a regression in terms of cataloging, progress is imminent in the shape of the modern card catalog: after standardizing the cards, Thaddeus Harris transfers them — just like Abb é Rozier had done — onto a more stable foundation: instead of employing loose sheets of paper, he uses cards with greater durability to strengthen the catalog against wear and tear. “ The only step remaining was to paste these slips on cards of uniform size, instead of sheets, and the result was a card catalogue. ”3 6 For easy access, cards are kept in wooden drawers. This catalog lasts through 1912, in active use as master record for nearly seventy years.\" (Markus :87)
\n\"A final step in the development of the modern card index, unrestricted access to the catalog for a common readership, finally occurs in 1861 when Ezra Abbot (1819 – 1884), a highly regarded Bible scholar and library assistant at Harvard under John Langdon Sibley, establishes new features. After more than twenty years of practical application, the index cards at Harvard have proven feasible for internal library use. Yet Abbot recognizes the necessity that individual readers attain access to the collection as well.\" (Markus :87)
\n\"The master record — namely, Harris s 1833 catalog, accessible until then only to librarians — once again serves as a basis for the card-by-card generation of two new “ indexes, ” an alphabetical one and one arranged by subject. Acquisitions are registered first in the master record, then on cards for the other two registers — including cross-references. “ [The] work which is once correctly done on these cards is done for ever. [T]he cards that have been written, representing the new and important additions, may be inserted in their proper places in the drawer. ”3 9 As an additional aid to the reader, the new catalogs receive a special ergonomic design that will considerably determine the shape of the first card index systems a few years later\" (Markus :88)
\n\"Looking back on the development of the apparatus, Abbot s assistant Charles Ami Cutter summarizes the interaction between hardware and software: “ It was easier to plan the drawers in which the new catalogue should be kept than the system on which it should be constructed. ”4 6 For this reason, the description of the catalog in the final report from 1864 contains an extensive explanation of the underlying principles of classification, a reference manual including detailed implementation instructions whose complexity exceeds that of the hardware by far. 4\" (Markus :89)
\n\"Before work on the catalog officially begins on October 22, 1861, Ezra Abbot carries out an extensive experimental phase to test the apparatus and the feasibility of the card-indexing process. He carefully measures the average data set: using this process, how many cards can be generated and recorded per hour? The result of 12.5 index cards per hour permits Abbot, in direct contrast to William Croswell, to calculate the production and construction of the catalog up to its temporary completion, and thus he can estimate how many employees are needed.\" (Markus :89)
\n\"The number of employees steadily rises, and already in 1862 a part of the new catalog can be made accessible to the general public. Despite the generally appreciated advantages of the new apparatus, it takes another eight years until the catalog is finally completed in 1870, and the whole process comes to its conclusion. 5 2\" (Markus :89)
\n\"Yet the sometimes sorry, sometimes glorious history of its development is supplanted once the use of card catalogs is no longer restricted to libraries. This major transition, initiated by a librarian in 1876, transforms the box of paper slips into the most important accounting and management tool in nearly every offi ce by the turn of the century. This transformation of the “ card catalog ” into the “ card index, ” this discursive transfer from library to bureau is realized by a company called Library Bureau\" (Markus :90)
\n\"On October 6, 1876, a 25-year-old assistant librarian signs the corporate charter of the American Library Association thus: “ Number One, Melvil Dewey. ”1 On Dewey s initiative, America s most famous librarians have assembled in order to found an association with the aim of promoting “ the best reading for the greatest number, at the least cost. ”2 Despite his youth, the initiator assumes the position of secretary, and from then on devotes himself to the development of American librarianship through the association. From age sixteen, Dewey, who comes from a modest background and has been brought up strictly in the evangelical mind-set of white AngloSaxon Protestantism, is bent on reforming America in three ways. Already as a student, he rallies against alcohol and tobacco consumption, and for introducing the European metric system for weights and measures. Dissatisfied as a student, he declares the education system in New York State a failure: he feels it would be possible to learn double the amount in the same time, above all by simplifying English orthography. 3 Dewey begins by reforming his own name, first eliminating the superfluous letters “ l ” and “ e ” from his fi rst name in 1875, and, four years later, by spelling his last name as well as everything else in phonetic transcription: “ Dui, Melvil. ” 4\" (Markus :94)
\n\"In his quest for national reforms, Melvil Dewey is inspired by Edward Edwards s Memoirs of Libraries , an influential library history of his time. A struggle for “ free libraries for every soul ” becomes the third aim of his reform plan. 5 Within the scope of his service as an assistant librarian at Amherst College, Dewey has the chance to outline a more efficient organization of the library s routines and to optimize the library s management. Faithful to his motto, “ My heart is open to anything that s either decimal or about libraries, ”6 he seizes the opportunity to combine two of his preoccupations, securing for himself a place in library history, and from 1930 onward a mark on every index card of the Library of Congress: the Dewey decimal classification system\" (Markus :95)
\n\"Once introduced to libraries worldwide, this system would grant unfailing and language-independent access to books, 9 an unambiguously composed numerical address thus leading directly to the desired text.\" (Markus :95)
\n\"Dewey s decimal classification system also lays claim to features such as boundless extensibility general intelligibility and clarity to a rather unusual degree ( “ It must claim as little energy in use as possible ”1 0 ). It partitions every field of knowledge down to the level of the individual component. “ Thus, for instance, every lunar crater can be named unambiguously by further division of the number 52334. ”1 1\" (Markus :95)
\n\"The recent graduate and passionate librarian embarks on his career as an educational reformer by founding three companies within one year: the American Metric Bureau, the Spelling Reform Association, and, toward the end of the year, the American Library Association, using capital borrowed from his landlady, his older brother, and a Boston publisher.\" (Markus :96)
\n\"uniform cataloging techniques on uniform materials of consistently high quality. In his view, internal business processes in library management and reader service, above all the catalogs, will need to be submitted to strict standardization procedures. With the help of generalized forms, rules, and systematic arrangements for everything from centralized and standardized printing of index cards, to drawers and boxes to fit them in, to inkwells and pens, he begins to “ synchronize ” libraries. Application of all these innovations is to lead, in Dewey s vision, to “ an immense saving of time. ” 1 8\" (Markus :97)
\n\"Thus, one of the fi rst projects undertaken by the new American Library Association in January 1877 is a standardization program, with the aim of establishing rules for cataloging processes, catalog entries, and bibliographical norms (in the best tradition, yet without knowledge of the algorithms of the Josephinian project). 1 9 One issue for this bibliographical system is the external appearance of book catalogs, particularly the question of correct measurements for a Standard Catalogue Card 2 0 As secretary and host of the meetings of the Co-operation Committee, Dewey invests less into originality than into realizing his reform principle of optimization. He by no means invents the card index anew, yet he aims to improve Ezra Abbot s catalog construction manual, finally patenting the entire object and touting it as an innovative achievement meant for permanent application.\" (Markus :98)
\n\"Instead, they aim to create the sense of a homegrown American technology. European magazines are slow to defy this claim, and do so rather timidly. “ I should not like to enter upon an inquiry on the origin of the Card catalogue. One thing appears certain; its origin is not American, as seems to be generally supposed. ”2 2 However, before all the index cards settle into their drawers, there remains the issue of standardizing the heterogeneous. The American Library Association helps by gaining infl uence in important libraries. As the association lacks competition, it can easily prescribe standards for the young and disorganized market.\" (Markus :99)
\n\"The executive board of the Readers and Writers Economy Company examines his books and finds completely inscrutable accounting, deciding immediately to initiate an external investigation, as well as issuing an injunction against Dewey. The chaos, once officially confirmed, puts Dewey in a bind: he is forced to resign as manager and president of the company, and other demissions follow. The executive board limits his financial authority, and finally under massive pressure he leaves the company, having lost the trust of his remaining directors — but stubbornly defending his aims and reformist intentions as purely altruistic. 2 9 Notwithstanding, Dewey does not abstain from his desire to supply the library world with materials. 3 0 While the Readers and Writers Economy Company now starts to pursue its own profitable paths, already on March 20, 1881, Dewey announces the foundation of a new company — which is simply his old one, cleansed of accounting discrepancies, once more bankrolled with borrowed capital and unequivocal messages of continuity: “ All Metric articles will be sold as before under the name Metric Bureau [. ] The Library Supply Department will go under the name Library Bureau ”3 1\" (Markus :101)
\n\"As of spring 1881, Library Bureau points the way to a significant technology transfer between library and office, turning library-technical discourse into a business. 3 2\" (Markus :101)
\n\"Bearing considerable financial losses, Dewey succeeds in averting the ruin of Library Bureau. On May 26, 1888, the reorganized company meets under the presidency of Melvil Dewey. Despite his role in the previous bankruptcy, Herbert Davidson is again employed by the company, but this time to concentrate less on financial management than on “ manufacturing and sales. ”3 5 E. W. Sherman, employed as an accountant since 1887 and later the woman to lead the Indexing Department, insists on an organizational change. She has come to appreciate the ease with which card indexes allow system maintenance and persuades Dewey to let her transfer her accounting books to cards. Yet Dewey, wedded to the traditional library paradigm and marked by his experiences with untransparent accounting, remains distrustful of loose paper slips, fearing data loss and misplaced entries. “ The inventor of the card system exclaimed: This won t do! This won t do! Why? I asked. Because cards will be lost, he replied. ”3 6 Nevertheless, Sherman insists and negotiates a six-month trial. She assures Dewey that if only one card is misplaced, they will transfer the whole process back into a bound book, at her own expense. The experiment succeeds, and even begets a business idea. It demonstrates that accounting on slips of paper is clearer, easier to audit, and above all quicker to handle. From then on, Library\" (Markus :102)
\n\"The successful introduction of commercial data based on paper slips begins with the most traditional note bank in Europe. In 1852, the Bank of England rearranges its account management on index cards stored in boxes. 3 9 This prompts numerous banks to follow suit; the fi rst one in America is the Williamsburg Savings Bank in New York in 1884, after its president was inspired by the library catalog at Columbia University — precisely at the time of Dewey s management of this institution — as a potential tool for the managing of bank deposits. 4 0\" (Markus :103)
\n\"The expected gain in money and time is immediately confirmed, and in short order, nearly all the life insurance companies in the United States unite into an exclusive card index and mailing list club, potentially refusing the admittance of new members. 4 1 This special insurance policy against unsatisfactory insurance policies not only becomes a best seller, but also proves how effectively central catalogs and index card sets can be shared and used.\" (Markus :103)
\n\"As a result, President Dewey negotiates a new contract with the executive board, securing 20 percent of company profits as well as control over development for himself. 4 8 These dividends prove profi table in the persistent upward trend in the market for office equipment: while in 1894 Dewey earns $3,650, by 1895 his profit has increased to $5,750. The next years bring even more rapid growth as the boom continues. The revenue growth of Library Bureau owes its reassuring ascent to standardized slips of paper, wooden drawers, and boxes sold at fair prices. Credit for the substantial commercial success of card indexes goes to Herbert Davidson. Besides banks and insurance companies, he wins railroad companies, government departments, and other large-scale enterprises as loyal customers. 4 9 Against Dewey s attempts to fetter the capitalist expansion of Library Bureau, starting in 1891 management opens numerous offices and sales branches with demonstration sites in other towns to promote future business and enhance its market power in other areas.\" (Markus :105)
\n\"Showing the same reserve with which they met the index card printing offered as a service by Library Bureau since 1878, the management of a majority of American libraries reacts cautiously to Library Bureau s steady praise of the card index. Only after considerable delay does the idea return to the libraries around 1900, finally asserting itself as their very own technology for data management with unlimited and unbounded use.\" (Markus :105)
\n\"From the successfully occupied central position between the coordinates “ library ” and “ office, ” management shifts gradually toward the second term to define the office realm as a new and very fertile market. The benefit of libraries remains no more than a (nearly) forgotten starting point that must now give way to a focus on the office. 5\" (Markus :107)
\n\"The demand from government and business for effi cient reference management — that is, sorting and filing papers — is ultimately a reaction to the recent paper flood catalyzed by stenography, carbon paper, and typewriters. After government institutions dealing with statistics in the widest sense begin to pay attention to Library Bureau, it is hardly surprising that Herman Hollerith, who has been in touch with Herbert Davidson since 1895, does the same. On March 31, 1896, Library Bureau and Hollerith s Tabulating Machine Company (later to be known as IBM) sign a (mere) three-year contract. Their goal is to join forces in order to support censuses abroad, railroad and insurance companies, and so on. Ten percent of the net profit goes to Library Bureau, which provides the cards required by the tabulating machines. As a consequence of this short period of cooperation, Library Bureau opens a branch in Paris to assist the French Ministry of the Interior in administering its census. However, other projects soon lead to differences between the partners. Hollerith claims control of the entire transportation market; Davidson disagrees. In March 1899, their collaboration comes to an abrupt end. 6\" (Markus :108)
\n\"Despite the long European tradition, and despite the long-established albeit relatively young American genealogy, and counter to the achievements of Herbert Davidson in transferring library technology to office organization, Dewey, for the rest of his life and against his better judgment, refused to admit that it was not he who played the chief part in the index card game. In fact, it was Charles Coffin Jewett who, at the fi rst worldwide librarian s conference in 1853 in New York (which Melvil Dewey naturally did not attend, being only two years old at the time), produced his card-based catalog\" (Markus :110)
\n\"In 1926, none other than E. Remington & Sons Typewriter Company, spun off by gun producer Eliphalet Remington II in 1886, acquires both Library Bureau and Globe Wernicke, merging them the following year with Rand Kardex to form Remington Rand Inc. 7 8 A department called Remington Kardex Bureau spurs the decisive advancement of the index card to an automated storage device principle whose origins refer once more to Europe, that is, to the eighteenth century and Jacques de Vaucanson as well as Joseph Marie Jacquard s punch cards. 7 9 After 1958, fi ve electric-pneumatically linked Remington Rand typewriters print the paper slips of the last analog catalog of the Austrian National Library, five copies synchronized by compressed air. However, they prove inferior to the more robust and soon widely used electric typewriters of the International Business Machines Corporation, and as a result are disposed of. 8 0 The intertwined genealogy of card index makers and typewriter manufacturers, leading to the production of the universal discrete machine, remains an American history of mergers and acquisitions. Remington Rand Inc. (manufacturer of UNIVAC in 1957) asserts itself as a small but persisting line of competition to IBM, merges in 1955 with Sperry Corp. into the Sperry Rand Corp., which in turn is acquired in 1986 by William Seward Burroughs s Adding Machine Co. and is combined into the Unisys Corp. (figure 6.4). The appreciation of corporate history exhibited by employees of the Sperry Rand Corp is praiseworthy enough: in 1976, a small independent company is spun off from the office supplies department threatened by liquidation, going by the name Library Bureau and to this day engaging in a modest yet flourishing library furniture business in Herkimer, New York. 8 1\" (Markus :113)
\n\"Yet the index card principle is recognized much more slowly in European libraries, so that the American delegation s suggestion to dismiss traditional bound catalogs in favor of the reimportation of loose card catalogs — insofar as the group aspires to such missionary efforts — is met with resistance. Though catalogs are by then accepted as universal search engines, they remain fixed in the library paradigm of the bound book\" (Markus :114)
\n\"The following part of this study aims less at reconstructing the extensive and passionate debate that finally yields to the triumph of the card index over bound catalogs 3 than at sketching the dissemination of the American indexing technique in the Old World. Largely stripped of its provenance, the card index reenters Europe via two channels. On the one hand, the American business community vouches for the latest office\" (Markus :114)
\n\"machines and above all the card index as a timeand labor-saving device, transferring the early scientifi c management ideas of Frederick W. Taylor and Frank B. Gilbreth into the office. 4 On the other hand, a massive European demand for new library technologies develops independently of the office innovation realm, owing to the construction and renovation of large national libraries.\" (Markus :115)
\n\"In 1854, a new phase of library architecture begins with the extension of the British Museum. Here, the architectural modern age meets growing storage needs by means of building stacks that no longer rely upon representative shelving, but obey the form dictated by shortage of space and the need for optimal access. In 1859, the Biblioth è que Nationale in Paris follows the principles established in London, lowering ceiling heights and furnishing shelves that no longer hug the walls, but “ stretch out like feelers into the middle of the space. ” 6\" (Markus :115)
\n\"The Viennese card index thus manages to assert itself as the permanent basis for book search, and this expansion of interfaces requires a gradual yet inevitable extension in everyday interaction with these delicate devices.\" (Markus :117)
\n\"What Ezra Abbot initiated for American libraries in 1861 now reappears as a European necessity: allowing access so far limited to privileged librarian s hands and thus responding to the inquiries of readers. The most urgent measure is the protection of Prussian index cards against unauthorized consultation or withdrawal.\" (Markus :118)
\n\"Library administrators raise many doubts about readers democratizing claim of free access to the catalog, which they nonetheless concede over time. There is at least a subliminal distrust toward intruders and their possible destruction of the established order.\" (Markus :118)
\n\"What remains indisputable is the discursive failure of the public library movement and its proponent Paul Ladewig. His brisk pamphlets in support of public libraries make him Dewey s German spokesperson — but they are defeated by the sharp criticism of his opponent Walter Hofmann, who dominates public attention with his proposal for small “ popular ” libraries.3 4 Ladewig fi nally concedes, “ The vigor of the German public library movement, at that time often under the name standard library, was significantly curbed. ”\" (Markus :119)
\n\"Though in Germany the demand for Library Bureau products seems to succumb to ongoing quarrels over suitable library supplies and catalog form, ideas about standardized and centrally printed slips of paper in uniform and extendable boxes gain hold in German offices. Eventually, European library administrations embrace the card index as a useful and efficient method for catalog management. Thus, the library tradition of data management and accounting that succeeds in business after 1890 and becomes a thriving industry in its own right finally returns to the library.\" (Markus :120)
\n\"While the slogan “ Free libraries for every soul ” becomes a bone of contention between librarians factions in Germany, the remaining points of Dewey s reform program are less controversial in the Old World. Perhaps the most important transmitter that spreads some of the American Library Association s arguments is in fact the Institut International de Bibliographie in Brussels, founded in 1895 by Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine, the latter having coined the phrase “ memory of the world ” in connection with the first international bibliographical conference. 3 6 “ What the founders of the institute have in mind is, ideally, gathering book titles from all times and peoples in one central location, in two separate series, an alphabetical author s index and a subject index using the decimal system. ”3 7 Since Dewey s decimal classification (an indispensable basis of the plan) is still regarded with skepticism in German libraries, the institute programmatically aims at its dissemination.\" (Markus :120)
\n\"The growth of the card index leaves little to be desired. By 1897, the universal register already contains about 1 million entries; by July 1, 1903, there are 6,269,750, and by 1914, more than 11 million slips of paper. 4 0 With an annual increase of approximately 500,000 entries, estimates see the project covering the “ entire book production since the invention of the printing press, ” anticipating the end of this gigantic enterprise after another ten years. 4 1 It is no coincidence that the development of the Bibliographia Universalis is reminiscent of Konrad Gessner s efforts. As a method for the production of index cards “ by cutting and pasting bibliographical aids, ” it undoubtedly harks back to this origin and bears a striking resemblance to its parameters even 350 years later — despite the improved copying procedures and printing methods, paper quality, and cutting devices that were developed in the meantime. 4\" (Markus :121)
\n\"Finally, in 1911 a “ preparatory committee ” attempts to imitate the Brussels bibliographical system — copying individual concepts like world brain and the aesthetics of illustrations (see figures 7.1, 7.2) 4 4 — and its administrative imports from the United States. 4 5 This committee, later attracting considerable attention, was not aiming exclusively at librarians; it bears the telling name The Bridge (Die Br ü cke) referring not to transatlantic or transEuropean transfers, but to a worldwide transfer of information between centers of scientific activity. The goal is to establish connections between islands of knowledge and bridge the shallows in the sea of ignorance. 4 6\" (Markus :121)
\n\"The Monographic Principle plans to take down every single thought faithfully in its ideal form, on paper, in standardized format. 5 3 “ If mental labor is to be organized, one must begin with the organization of the memo. ”5 4 Since bookbinders are the enemies of mobility, giving each free thought its own piece of paper to connect it with other building blocks of knowledge is essential. Thus, modularized world-knowledge is to be stored on monographic index cards at the “ reference desk of reference desks, ”5 5 Schwindstrasse 30, in Munich. This will afford intellectuals the means to recombine monographic thoughts into new constellations. 5 6 However, before they can store any such knowledge, the slips of paper must all have the same size, the so-called world format — a precursor of the DIN and ISO formats of German industry standards, but a successor of the “ mono format, ” the brainchild of a company that was bankrupt by 1911, and whose sales representative and chief administrator had been none other than Karl Wilhelm B \" hrer. 5 7\" (Markus :124)
\n\"Its organizational innovation movement pursues two strategic purposes: (1) An “ archive that will introduce a comprehensive illustrated world encyclopedia on single sheets of uniform format. ” At first, world knowledge is to be put down by professionals on standardized slips of paper and kept in standard boxes in a world format. 6 0 (2) A “ collection of addresses, containing the addresses of all living knowledge workers. ”6 1 Furthermore, they aim to gather pointers to knowledge, which by virtue of their own addressing logic lead to new information.\" (Markus :125)
\n\"Operating an index card box tempts people to develop a euphoria of totality — and not only the The Bridge members. In 1897, the imperial librarian in south Berlin, Christlieb Gotthold Hottinger, announces a Book Slip Catalog and a Bio-Icono-Bibliographical Collection nearly at the same time as Otlet s institute does so in Brussels, and presumably inspired by American index card printing.\" (Markus :125)
\n\"Unlike The Bridge, Hottinger s plan relies on decentralized and active cooperation, and Hottinger asks all “ friends of intellectual life ” to participate. “ With every single slip of paper, its author etches his name into the human monument of intellectual endeavor. ”6 6 The two projects, the BioIcono-Bibliographical Collection and The Bridge, are united by the field of operation they wish to occupy; they announce that their programs will cover no less than the entire world. If the world forms the totality of the scientific body of knowledge, nothing should be left over in the end.\" (Markus :126)
\n\"The contemporary library and administrative technology, the new office apparatuses encourage the pioneers of the world brain development in their bold projects. However, the card index, euphorically imagined as a mechanical memory machine, still obscures from view the robotic character of the machinery. Indeed, the input of records still requires a human being. 7 1 The initiators of these global data projects succumb to the belief that having the algorithm also means immediately having the results.\" (Markus :127)
\n\"B \" hrer proves that he has already forgotten the difference between signifier and signified. Instead of storing the address of a music archive in The Bridge s card index (as metainformation of metainformation) or copying its catalogs (as a transfer of metainformation), he goes ahead and purchases the entire archive. 8 3 Tempted as he was by the idea of completeness, this was only the first, practical step to the realization of his plan. The Bridge resembles Dewey s project in a quite unexpected way — its inevitable failure. The partners financial plight intensifi es when the expected donations by “ very rich people ” fail to materialize. 8 4 Meanwhile, B \" hrer leads the business inexorably into ruin. In June 1914, exactly three years after its foundation, bailiffs close the offices of The Bridge in Schwindstrasse 30. The proof of fundamental incompleteness will not be disclosed until 1931, when Kurt G ö del s proof of formally undecidable sentences is published.\" (Markus :128)
\n\"The central point of their interaction and mutual reinforcement lies in the search for efficiency, for increased achievement. The energetic imperative suggests avoiding wasting energy ( W ), and moreover seeks to increase it. However, Taylor s studies disassemble larger movements punctiliously into smaller ones, analyzing the time needed so as to decrease it. The overlap of the two theories is not by accident the defi nition of efficiency and after 1911 the efficiency craze in the United States becomes almost a pop phenomenon. 5\" (Markus :130)
\n\"However, in this final chapter we will not explore the complex development of scientific office management. 1 6 Rather, we will focus on a product catalyzed by office management and placed at the center of attention: the card index as a handy and surprisingly useful aggregation of paper slips. How does the organizational discourse succeed in giving a traditionally established principle the surprising appeal of irresistible novelty, promising an unprecedented increase in administrative efficiency? How is the principle of indexing liberated from its prehistory and made new to satisfy the increasing market for office machines and its moneyed clients?\" (Markus :132)
\n\"As we have seen in previous chapters, technology transfer between the industrialized continents, which up to the year 1890 had occurred mainly from east to west, begins to take place the other way around in the shape of a lasting scientifi c management and ergonomics discourse. 1 7 Concepts such as efficiency rationalization standardization arrive under the imported paradigm of organization and the prevalent principle of the shortest time asserts itself in terms of both voluntary and unavoidable reforms of European institutions.\" (Markus :132)
\n\"The correct choice for one s company among the variety of systems offered can be made only on the basis of a distinction between writing and reading. 3 4 The first type, a reading index , is good for accumulating information, stored every now and then as read-only memory Just as the book used to be considered a depository of knowledge, so the card index replaces the book by means of a more adaptable and “ mobile memory. ”3 5 An intermediate position is occupied by the second type, the writing card index, because information is stored briefly and disappears just as quickly. Its storage features remain arbitrary and allow for a random-access memory — however, it is precisely addressed. With the aid of sorting criteria such as the strict alphabetical ordering of keywords, customer names, and the like, access is considerably accelerated: each card is immediately at hand and, not least, always offers suitable opportunities for checking. 3 6 With the arrangement of modularized slips of paper, access to the slip boxes undergoes a change as well. Consultation of the card index occurs from another perspective: the book may not force sequential access, but it certainly suggests that path (though it does permit browsing); by contrast, the card index requires ipso facto a different perspective. Extracts from its data occur by recombining the modularized entries, permitting an easy overview — and it is exactly the absence of this overview that is posed by conservative bookkeepers as a counterargument. 3 7 Yet the variations afforded by level card index or view card index technologies eliminate this defect. 3 8\" (Markus :135)
\n\"A decisive incentive for the complex deployment of card indexes in business is their ability to grant several users simultaneous access to independent commercial proceedings. 4 3 This is multitasking in a multiuser system: an order is no longer limited to one authorized bookkeeper successively entering transactions, but exists asynchronously alongside numerous other processes, handled by other workers — as promoted by the Taylorist concept of the division of labor. 4 4\" (Markus :136)
\n\"Anywhere this technology is already in use, numerous improvements, according to the logic of “ updating, ” seek to save even more time. However, one obstacle stands in the way of an ideal time savings: for fear of being replaced themselves, unwilling bureaucrats defend themselves against subversion by machines that threaten to take over their work.\" (Markus :136)
\n\"However, before the card index legitimately conquers each and every business area and evolves into a universal (office) machine, a law is quashed, an event that will be discussed here in some detail. The law in question is not altered overnight. Rather, its effect is slowly vitiated by the practice of keeping ledgers, the basis of bookkeeping, on loose sheets of paper.\" (Markus :138)
\n\"According to § 43 of the new code of commercial law that comes into effect on May 10, 1897, German businessmen are obliged to keep their books in a living language and with an eye to form: “ Books are required to be bound and numbered sheet by sheet or page by page with sequential numerals. ”5 0 Until 1897, § 32 of the trade law prescribed the mandatory use of bound books; with the new version the “ must ” mandate becomes a “ should ” rule. The motivation for this seemingly tiny alteration that, according to commentators on this law, refers not to the ledger but to auxiliary books, is the institutional and transatlantic use of the card index as a key instrument for efficient accounting and documentation of commercial proceedings. 5 1 The card indexes sold by Library Bureau prompt the bookkeeping departments of nearly all American firms to convert to loose-leaf or card ledgers within a decade. 5 2\" (Markus :138)
\n\"Eventually, the dispute concentrates on the essential mediahistorical question, “ What is a book? ”5 6 In the administrative parlance of 1908, the sober answer is, “ In the expert view, and above all according to the latest court authority, a bound book needs to be equipped with pages that are sequentially paginated, and it must be bound so that no one can remove a sheet from the book without visible damage to the book and the sequence of page numbers. ”5 7 In these terms, the permanent accounting book fits the definition. Novel implementations emerge from this definition, though, such as book covers held together by screws that allow a book to be rebound (see figure 8.3).\" (Markus :139)
\n\"Eventually the more advantageous procedure ousts the conventional form by circumventing legal regulations. Complemented by copying procedures that transfer card entries into ledgers and thereby prevent errors, the permanent accounting book comes to dominate bookkeeping, subverting the law by means of widespread practical application. 5\" (Markus :140)
\n\"“ Today no field of application can be imagined for which the use of a card index would not be of assistance. ”6 2 Thus, although the German term denotes sheer disarray, business literally and comprehensively becomes a Zettelwirtschaft a “ paper slip economy. ”\" (Markus :140)
\n\"It is essential to follow the relationship between the terms B ü cherei and Kartei in order to render the installation of a card index practicable. For the determining factor for the analogy is the initial concept and the number of references a card index can manage. A decentralized, accessible B ü cherei seems conceptually better suited than a huge, central, traditional, and infi nitely complex Bibliothek whose endless fl ood of material has overpowered various cardindexing aspirations in the preceding centuries. 8 1 Porstmann s tactical support of the word Kartei aimed at securing the card index an omnipresent place in the offi ce world, rendering it as widespread and common as a small public library. Porstmann suggests the feasibility of a card index system in parallel to the budding B ü cherei movement, thus abandoning the traditional connotations of differentiation. Hence, it is barely surprising that Karteikunde his manual for the effi cient handling of a card index, contains no hints whatsoever as to a possible genealogy of the card index from library technology, let alone any technological transfer. The card index appears in the office organization discourse without the shackles of its library tradition, doomed to youthfulness and novelty.\" (Markus :143)
\n\"The inadequacy of the book having thus been declared, salvation can be found only in the card index, whose multidimensional representation remedies the shortcomings of the book. It exploits the disadvantages of the book, only to finally unite the peculiarities of many books. 8 9\" (Markus :144)
\n\"This relatively early diagnosis of a crisis of linearity, with its unexpected anticipation of theoretical arguments resembling the hypertext debate of the last few years, inspires card index doctor Porstmann to formulate in Karteikunde a modest “ philosophy of the writing surface. ”9 0 On this level, instigated ( angezettelt ) by the weaving of a texture, the development expands into a spatial network, as it were, of commercial fabric. 9 1 Recalling the associative technology that connects the current-account card index with a suitable spot in the customer address index via a cross-reference, for instance, and thus breaks through the two-dimensional surface of the card index, a textual theorist and master of the fragment concludes in his own unconventional logic, “ The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing. ”9 2 By virtue of higher complexity, the requirements of managing economic affairs around 1920 demand a mobile memory arrangement.\" (Markus :145)
\n\"scholar, the inserted learned subject, to be overcome, so that card indexes can hook up to card indexes and establish data streams whose transfer is less susceptible to mistakes. Subjects as well as (accounting) books are always potential triggers for errors, because the word serves them better than the protocol and control of numbers. “ Transfers are sources of error. Moreover, transfers that occur periodically rather than necessarily cause a paralyzing lag, never being finished, and turn bookkeeping into what it shouldn t be: the writing of history. ”9 7\" (Markus :145)
\n\"the history of the card index disappears, along with the book, from accounting. The defoliation of the book frees the businessman, ignorant of library technology, from any knowledge about the development of his preferred tool. What it records are no longer characters of a living language — as § 43 HGB 1 required — but merely figures without histories. In its business application, the card index may no longer describe the past; it need only calculate figures (and at most, store them). It is a pure calculating machine. From this exclusive reorientation toward numbers, the development of automated mechanical accounting ensues almost unnoticed: initially, punch cards are employed for bookkeeping in large companies; then they become a medium of universal memory, read electrically, and take up a systemic place under the invalid term “ bookkeeping. ” Hence, the attempt to outline the evolutionary development of the card index — from its supposed origins in sixteenth century Zurich all the way to the desks and card index troughs in offices around 1930 — must end here, at the threshold of electrified calculability on a binary basis, on the eve of the universal discrete machine. Only the usually tacit use of card indexes beyond accounting, “ for all independent professionals such as doctors, authors, etc., ” prevents us from being unable to tell these stories. At this very concrete historical point in time, this collection of data-processing episodes on preelectric slips of paper also comes to an end, but not without a brief summary and a short preview of fully electronic connections.\" (Markus :146)
\n\"The card index machine progresses inexorably after 1930 toward substituting its data carriers with punch cards and electric procedures to keep pace with new industrial standards. 9 9 Nonetheless, an ever-thinning line continues in the wake of progress up to the present day that preserves the continuity of card index technology. It is left to the residues of a recent office reform to unfold its effects in operational areas this side of electronic systems — for instance, in the preservation of monuments in the German Rhineland, or in the compilation of a “ Card Index of Jobless Qualifi ed Germanists and Germanists Threatened by Unemployment. ” 1 00 Major libraries, like those in Vienna and Berlin, were recently seized by the winds of electronic progress. 1 01\" (Markus :149)
\n\"And yet they remain the same — for instance, when one attempts to write the history of a reference technology and its many transformations. Its episodes and building blocks wander from books onto single slips of paper, are accumulated in digital or paper form, only to congeal, rearranged and formatted, into book form again — a laborious procedure. Nonetheless, an essential quality of the card index is precisely the efficiency of this system. The economy of signs allows us to feed on them over and over again. Though the care of the card index demands its own time, it can be regained in the end. “ My card index costs me more time than the writing of books themselves, ” Bielefeld systems theorist Niklas Luhmann admitted, as perhaps the last analog card index theorist. 1 One might be surprised at first, given a publication list as prolific as his, unless one acknowledges the card index as the furnace in which the texts are forged. “ In principle, it is an infinity, ” as Luhmann described his communication partner, and thus it makes perfect sense that numerous entries and stories linked to them had to be left out of this revised and updated history of the cultural technology of quotation management. Owing to the strictures of book publishing, they must remain in my card index. For instance, the further development from punch cards and floppy disks to the USB memory stick extends from around 1930 to today as the gradual electrification of data processing in the library.\" (Markus :150)
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The Battle of the Books\"
\"As science threatened the supremacy of theology and its legitimating influence in the political sphere, rulers sought the preservation of their power in classical ideals. In this sense, the library, which felt the pangs of change as books increased in number and kind, became a battleground of contesting ideologies. Was it a storehouse of wisdom, preserving timeless ideals for the edification of those burdened with rulership? Or could it become a garden of books, in which knowledge proliferated and flourished in limitless colors and forms? \"
\n\"His parsing of all human knowledge into three categories—memory, wisdom, and imagination—became an organizing principle of empirical thought. In his system, Bacon eschewed the division of sacred and secular, harking back to classical epistemologies that emphasized relations among disciplines of the mind. His taxonomy enjoyed a lasting influence: Diderot adopted the scheme in volume 1 of his 1751 Encyclopédie, and it has been called the forerunner of modern library classifications\"
\n\"In 1664, the Dissenters, Protestants who questioned the pomp and authority of the Anglican Church, had been forced out of the universities, thus closing to them the surest routes to power and position. Dissenting ministers in turn set up their own academies, in which Puritan theology and Baconian science held sway over the classical curriculum of Cambridge and Oxford.\"
\n\"Harvard College would be the Cambridge and the Oxford of the Puritan Commonwealth, attuned to reason and revelation as the wellsprings of its power to turn boys into men.
\nThrough the 1600s, the library of Harvard College grew slowly and erratically, still dependent on the generosity of donors (a dependency that has not changed, except for the number of donors and their largesse). But through this growth it remained largely a theological library, consistent with the college’s mission of producing ministers for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.\"
\n\"by 1764, when on a cold night in January a fire destroyed the library, their gifts had swelled the library to some five thousand volumes, making it the largest library in British North America. By then, it reflected the whole range of learning in its Baconian scope; memory, wisdom, and imagination were all fully represented\"
\n\"the barriers to a “modern” education were formidable among the spires, cells, and alcoves of Oxford and Cambridge. The colleges concerned themselves not with producing new scientists, engineers, and artists but with turning young gentlemen into statesmen and leaders in the Anglican Church. For all their notoriety, even the great university scientists like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle had little influence over the undergraduate curriculum.\"
\n\"The curriculum deemed necessary for the work of turning privileged boys into powerful men was neither theological nor scientific, but classical, and one of its finest products was the baronet Sir William Temple. \"
\n\"In 1690, he published a pamphlet of his own, Of Ancient and Modern Learning.
\nIn the essay, Temple argues that one of modern learning’s chief problems is its reliance on books. It is not more books we need, he writes—the ancients had plenty of those; but they had learning also, and taste. And the mere proliferation of books is no guarantee of an expansion in learning and taste. Modern learning is too cloistered; the life of letters should be what it was for the Romans: at once personal and political, and vigorous above all.\"
\n\"Temple decried the proliferation of text engendered by the printing press. Wotton, too, acknowledges that the availability of vast numbers of books has wrought a change in learning—but it is a change, he argues, for the better.\"
\n\"When Temple looked at the explosion of new printed books, he saw no “Industry,” but only diffusion, decay, and petty bickering. To Wotton, however, the disputes of the moderns, and the new books emerging from them, only prove the vigor and progressive potential of modernity when compared with a monolithic, centralized Roman Empire, in which “one Common Interest guided that vast Body.”\"
\n\"In reducing the great works of antiquity to so much textual matter under the philological microscope, Temple felt, the moderns robbed the ancient texts of their sublime uniqueness, their untouchability. For Wotton, though, as for his mentor Richard Bentley, this new approach simply heralded the arrival of a new sensibility, in which the apparatuses of scholarship—the collations, the dissertations, the growing libraries—had in their scope a kind of sublimity as well. \"
\n\"In the eighteenth century, George III would, with the help of Samuel Johnson and others, build the Royal Library into one of the most extraordinary—and extraordinarily beautiful—collections of books in the world. It now resides in the new British Library, in a great glass tower in the center of the public concourse, from within which its many fine bindings glitter like jewels. But at the end of the seventeenth century, the library was a mishmash of classical works acquired for the edification of monarchs, church literature, and politico-theological tracts.
\nWhen Bentley assumed the role of keeper of the royal collection, he was aghast at its state. He immediately moved to secure certain funding for the library and to turn it from a moribund curiosity cabinet into an international institution of higher learning.
\nIn so doing, he articulated a vision of the universal library that was strikingly ahead of its time. In a proposal published in broadsheet form, he laid out the problem for the reading public: “[the library] has gradually gone to great Decay, to the great dishonour of the Crown and the whole Nation. The Room is miserably out of Repair; and so little, that it will not contain the Books that belong to it . . . many valuable Manuscripts are spoiled for want of Covers.” Bentley went on to complain that “above a Thousand”books waited to join the collection, but were still “unbound and useless”—this in violation of the Act of Printing, by which printers were required to deposit copies of their works in the Royal Library in order to secure copyright. This law, which dated to the Elizabethan era, had long been neglected; as a result, few of the thousands of titles printed in England throughout the seventeenth century had made their way to the Royal Library. Bentley would lobby hard for enforcement of the Act of Printing. He further proposed paying the library’s way with a trust fund endowed by a tax on paper, to ensure the growth and magnificence of the library. The library that would result from these measures, he wrote, should be “so contriv’d for Capaciousness and Convenience, that every one that comes here, may have two hundred thousand volumes, ready for his use and service.” \"
\n\"Bentley’s vision for the Royal Library departs strikingly from such a model. In an important sense, it harks back to the ideal of the universal library of antiquity, of which Alexandria’s libraries were the best-remembered exemplars. But in his ambitions, Bentley was forward looking, too; aspects of his grand plans anticipate the research libraries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, he imagined the library’s becoming a center of intellectual activity, where scholarly societies might hold “Conferences . . . about matters of Learning.\"
\n\"As Gilbert McEwen shows in The Oracle of the Coffee House, his study of the journal, the Mercury was a source of education for the “middling sort” of person—shopkeepers and tradespeople with little formal education, and the professional class emerging from the dissenting academies. Strikingly progressive, the paper consistently championed education for the working classes and for women.\"
\n\"Swift’s first published poem, in fact, is his “Ode to the Athenian Society,” in which he extolled the “great Unknown, and far-exalted Men” whose wisdom filled both sides of the Mercury’s sheet twice weekly. Later Swift learned that this “Society” was actually composed of just three Grub Street hacks. Its publisher and guiding spirit, a bookseller by the name of John Dunton, was a product of the dissenting academies who flourished in the book trade of London’s coffeehouse demimonde.\"
\n\"But although Dunton’s Mercury was founded on a literary hoax, his writers did their best to answer questions honestly and comprehensively. They preferred in all things the evidence of experiment over the authority of ancient sources, though when one was unavailable, the other would do. In some questions, they relied on the latest empirical science.\"
\n\"Editors and readers of sheets like the Mercury advanced the modernity that the genteel education assiduously avoided, thereby following William Wotton’s advice in emulating the energy and initiative of the ancients rather than the empty shells of their poetical forms. Above all, they were hungry to read—a hunger they sated with steady diets of the books and pamphlets offered by the likes of John Dunton.
\nSwift and Temple, however, considered these modern energies incompatible with all that is true and beautiful in art. In time, Swift would embrace the means of modern publishing as he embraced his Irish identity, writing and publishing in pamphlets and journals, cementing his reputation both as a satirist and as a patriot.\"
\n\"But at the time of the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, Swift, like Temple, saw the flow of middling books from the bookshops of wits like Dunton as a torrent that threatened to engulf everything he believed in. \"
\n\"With his caricature of Bentley, Swift may have offered the first instance of that literary cliché—the doddering librarian. Indeed, the entire modern iconography of the library is present here, all the stereotypes are in motion: the learned pedant, crabbed and dust-addled, himself consumed by and consuming bookworms, is lost in the vastness of the library. The library itself is a place of dark, “obscure corners,” full of shadows among which books and readers alike may be lost. It is a kind of literary purgatory, in which texts of all kinds and qualities risk confounding their individual identities. A place of stasis, of stultifying confusion, it is also a place of (mock) tumult, intellectual combat, and literary confabulation. \"
\n\"The library of Swift’s satire is the prototype of the universal library, not only in numerical terms—for Swift imagines a library teeming with books in far greater numbers than were typically found in libraries of the time—but in its spirit as well: for conflict among books is what the universal library is about. The choices are not made for the reader; the reader must do the choosing, and the books must compete for his attention. In this, Swift comes much closer to the fondest hopes of his antagonist Bentley than he might have realized at the time. \"
\n\"So in Swift’s own library we find the irony of his satire reflected. For unlike the typical ecclesiastical library—unlike that of the Puritan John Harvard, for instance—Swift’s shows a large number of works that spring from the modern learning. Indeed Swift, for all his railing against the usurpations of the moderns, compiled a library that was the fruit of those cultural changes which made the modern possible.\"
\n\"many books in Swift’s library would have been gifts. Nonetheless, Swift took great care in fashioning his library and in structuring it. He organized his library, it seems, as much to make an impression on the visitor as to aid him in finding and using the books\"
\n\"The sale catalog of Swift’s books, drawn up after they had been removed from the deanery upon his death, similarly lists books by size. This is reminiscent of Harvard’s library, and other contemporary catalogs as well. Even the largest libraries were still modest enough to allow librarians to keep track of all the books without resort to complex cataloging techniques. The canon was still intact; the books contained in even the most copious libraries, personal or institutional, were all part of the same generally recognized set of platonically ideal works.\"
\n\"The image of the ancients as a band of brothers back-to-back at a bibliographical Agincourt, the advent of print as a flood or torrent, the doddering pedantry of the bookworm, and the hubris of the critic—these tropes are put to use in later times. \"
\n\"From here, Irving moves on to a dilation of the troubles of the modern library, in terms Swift would have found congenial. He notes that formerly books were rare enough to remain truly precious; men treasured and protected them for all the difficulty they went through in making and obtaining them. “But the inventions of paper and the press have put an end to all these restraints,” Irving observes, and “the consequences are alarming.”
\nThe stream of literature has expanded into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea. A few centuries since, five or six manuscripts consituted a great library; but what would you say to libraries such as actually exist, containing three or four hundred thousand volumes; legions of authors at the same time busy; and the press going on with fearfully increasing activity, to double and quadruple the number? . . . [T]he world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names. Many a man of passable information, at the present day, reads scarcely anything but reviews; and before long a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking catalogue. \"
\n\"In his prescient imagination, however, the figure of the universal library rose prematurely into view; before Swift could satirize it, he had to invent it. The libraries caught up quickly, though. Those tens of thousands of upstart modern troops soon found their places alongside the ancients on the shelves, where they were joined inexorably by an immigrant tide from the ever-busy presses.\"
\n\"CHAPTER FIVE
Books for All\"
\"What’s striking now is that Beerbohm was very nearly right: in 1991, readers still perused the many volumes of the printed catalog, still filled out their call slips in longhand. Outwardly, the library changed little between the turn of the twentieth century and the day Beerbohm’s fictional poet paid his visit in 1991. All the changes—all the future—would seem to have taken place in the decade after 1991. Much changed at the British Library, to be sure: it moved from its British Museum quarters to a vast new complex on Euston Road; its online catalog, like those of libraries great and small around the world, fundamentally altered the way readers get and use books. But for all the changes and despite its democratization, the library remains a numinous place. As much to us as to Soames, inclusion in the library still represents a landmark in a literary life.
\nInwardly, libraries in 1891 had changed a great deal over the course of the nineteenth century, in ways that made Soames’s hopes quixotic. For the library had filled up; by the end of the nineteenth century, it was stocked so full of books that it had become easy to think that everyone might find a book of his or her own within its stacks.\"
\n\"But in the nineteenth century, the sheer proliferation of books in number and kind transformed the library from temple to market, from canon to cornucopia.\"
\n\"Like Enoch Soames, librarians in the nineteenth century looked to the future to fix their identity. Previously, the librarian had been animated by his relationship with books—relatively small numbers of books, organized into canons, consumed in the main by readers already intimate with them. The librarian’s role, then, was largely custodial; he counted books, fetched them, and later returned them to the shelves. But with the efflorescence of printed matter and its increased consumption by a reading public, the librarian’s relation with readers began to supplant his connection with the books in his charge. The principal image of the librarian switched from custodian to caregiver. In the nineteenth century, both the professional literature and the popular press presented images of librarians toiling to shape the tastes of their patrons, to conduct them through the pitfalls of the cheap, the tawdry, and the “highly seasoned” reading found in novels and newspapers toward a redeeming vision of high literary culture.\"
\n\"The tragic flaws of the Promethean impulse, pity and hubris, are the emotional poles of the librarian in the nineteenth century as well: pity for the low station of the reader, and hubris for the possibilities the library offers for the reformation of culture and society. \"
\n\"As the number of books grew, the intellectual integument that bound them into a cultural whole called “literature” was stretched to the breaking point. One of the mottoes of the public library movement that swept western Europe and America in the nineteenth century went like this: “a book for every person.” But the search for that personal story had been an existential dilemma long before it became an issue in library science\"
\n\"The British Library also grew as a result of its role as copyright registrar, which meant that a copy of every book published in Britain had a place in its stacks. The Royal Library had played this role long before, although publishers had deposited their work only sporadically, as Richard Bentley lamented in the late seventeenth century. One hundred years later, however, Britain was both drawing inward in its sense of difference from the other nations of Europe and expanding in hopes and power as an empire—and the need to define the national literature was felt more acutely. France, too, had its copyright library—the formidable Bibliothèque Nationale, whose collections at the end of the eighteenth century had swollen to more than 300,000 books, thanks to the seizure of the libraries of aristocrats and clergy in the wake of the revolution of 1793. As the nineteenth century wore on, the British Library would catch up with, but never surpass, its French counterpart; the Continental elegance of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s soaring, iron-laced vaults would provide counterpoint to the classical austerity of the Round Reading Room.\"
\n\"The British Library also grew as a result of its role as copyright registrar, which meant that a copy of every book published in Britain had a place in its stacks. The Royal Library had played this role long before, although publishers had deposited their work only sporadically, as Richard Bentley lamented in the late seventeenth century. One hundred years later, however, Britain was both drawing inward in its sense of difference from the other nations of Europe and expanding in hopes and power as an empire—and the need to define the national literature was felt more acutely. France, too, had its copyright library—the formidable Bibliothèque Nationale, whose collections at the end of the eighteenth century had swollen to more than 300,000 books, thanks to the seizure of the libraries of aristocrats and clergy in the wake of the revolution of 1793. As the nineteenth century wore on, the British Library would catch up with, but never surpass, its French counterpart; the Continental elegance of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s soaring, iron-laced vaults would provide counterpoint to the classical austerity of the Round Reading Room.
\nBut in the first few decades of the nineteenth century Britain’s national library began to grow—and in fact to balloon: by 1833, it owned nearly a quarter of a million books, a fivefold increase. Already in 1811, the Times of London was produced on steamdriven, drum-fed presses, and by the 1820s the use of steam to power printing presses was commonplace, and a number of technologies now converged to dramatically accelerate the pace at which books \"
\n\"and other printed materials were produced. Printing, which had changed little between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, at once ceased to be an artisanal craft, and the book became subject to the mass production that was a hallmark of the industrial revolution. \"
\n\"Central to Abbott’s book is an engraving that depicts the idealized efficiency, coordination, and mechanization of the printing process at midcentury. Although Abbott focused on the magic of the machine—the piping of steam, the transmission of power by shafts and belts, and the glamorous dance of the presses—his grand plan of the Cliff Street building shows that at midcentury it was above all the massing of labor power, of people—people segregated by gender and task and regulated by that cyclopean manifestation of modernity, the clock on the wall—that turned the book from being an objet d’art to being an interchangeable part. \"
\n\"As Walter Benjamin writes in his Arcades Project, the nineteenth century began with the use of cast iron to frame luxury spaces like London’s Crystal Palace. The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, too, showed off its iron skeleton, which bore the great vaults of the reading room skyward. The same iron-framing practices later transformed the stacks of the great libraries, too, allowing them to hold more books, better organized and safer from fire, than could have been imagined in the decades before. The importance of iron to nineteenth-century architecture is so great that Abbott digresses for a full chapter to explain the manufacture of iron beams and their use in construction. \"
\n\"The top floor contains the composing room, where typesetters fill their composing sticks with type sorts, reading backward. This operation, the heart of the printer’s craft, takes place at the zenith of the building. Later, Abbott describes at length the work of the compositor, in whom he witnesses a miraculous marriage of artisanal integrity and manufacturing efficiency\"
\n\"Printed by unfeeling machines, shipped from factories in bales and stacks, the book is no longer the work of an artisan. Its origins are mystified, bound up in electromechanical processes worthy of Frankenstein’s workshop. The book now is a simple commodity—but like most modern commodities, it is opaque to its user, who has no idea how to make one himself. And yet, as Abbott reveals, for all the electroplating and the steam-impelled dexterity of the presses, it is the fingers of craftspeople that advance the book into the machine age. \"
\n\"AS THE MASS-PRODUCED BOOK FLOURISHED, the British Museum, like national libraries throughout Europe and in America, suddenly bloomed with books by the hundreds of thousands. The unlikely person who would preside over this boom at the Library of the British Museum—and become the nineteenth century’s first librarian-Prometheus in the process—began his career as an exiled Italian revolutionary. A rising young lawyer, Antonio Panizzi antagonized the ducal government of his native Modena with his attachment to secret societies that mixed liberal politics with quasi-Masonic mysticism (this attraction to progressive ideology and esoteric knowledge perhaps prefigures Panizzi’s career as a librarian).\"
\n\"Panizzi quickly settled into the work that would assure his importance in the history of the British Library: cataloging. The library’s first printed catalog, which appeared in 1810, ran to seven volumes. Like all catalogs of its day, it was simply an alphabetical list of the books in the library, which served the librarians as an inventory of the books in their charge. Each year, most libraries would close for a few weeks, to permit the librarians to run down the list and ensure that each book was still in its place on the shelf. Catalogs were designed for little else. Readers, after all, generally came to the library prepared; they knew what books they wanted to see, and what they wanted to find in them.
\nYet between the time that first catalog was compiled and Panizzi’s arrival at the British Museum, the number of books in its collections had increased by an order of magnitude. The original seven-volume catalog had been stuffed by librarians with scribbled additions and addenda; its interleavings had swollen it to forty-eight volumes. Plainly, a new catalog was needed. Panizzi, who had already made his reputation within the library by cataloging a collection of impossibly complicated tracts from the English Civil War, was the librarian best prepared to tackle the job. \"
\n\"Panizzi developed a series of rules that reproduced these relations in the catalog, so that librarians—and crucially, readers—could trace and follow them. Unwittingly at first, he was helping to transform the library catalog from an inventory into an instrument of discovery. It’s tempting to say that his discovery of intertextuality among even the most mundane books forebodes the rise of the interconnected world of the digital age; it’s probably more accurate, however, to note that, from the vantage point of the wired world, Panizzi’s catalog looks like the beginnings of the Internet.
\nPlaced in charge of the effort to compile a new catalog, Panizzi employed these lessons from the start. No partial revision would suffice; he suggested a complete recataloging instead, in order to ensure internal consistency in the finished edition. He went abroad, too, to learn how other libraries made their catalogs.\"
\n\"“the first and chief object of a Catalogue,” he announced in an 1836 report to the museum’s trustees, is “easy access to the works which form part of the collection\"
\n\"“I want the poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,” he wrote the trustees, “of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom . . . and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.” To Panizzi, the humble library catalog could be more than a list, more even than a guide to knowledge: it could be the means to transform society itself.\"
\n\"Early in the project, Panizzi had chosen to add the “pressmark” of each book to its entry in the catalog. Like a call number on a modern library book, the gnomic pressmark indicated precisely the place where the book was to be found among the shelves of the library stacks (or “presses,” as bookshelves were commonly called). Unlike call numbers, however, pressmarks referred not to a scheme of knowledge, but to a location; they are not classifications, but only coordinates. \"
\n\"By providing such tutorials, Panizzi wanted to make the library transparent to readers—to replace the mysteries of its workings with a sophistication that would increase a reader’s independence.\"
\n\"Nicolas sensed that Panizzi was trying to produce not only a new kind of catalog but a new kind of reader as well—one more independent, more knowledgeable of library systems—and he wished to play no part in the revolution. \"
\n\"But conflict was unavoidable: from 1830 to 1840, the number of registered readers grew from 3,000 to 16,000, according to P. R. Harris’s History of the British Museum Library. Some 200,000 different books were ordered by those readers in a single year. Throughout the 1840s, however, the number of readers served each day remained steady, averaging about 230—close to the maximum the reading rooms could hold. Things were tight and tense in the Library of the British Museum as Panizzi’s monumental catalog lurched toward completion.\"
\n\"Panizzi’s cataloging effort ceased to aim at a single publication and became instead an ongoing effort, as cataloging is in all libraries to this day. \"
\n\"WHILE PANIZZI WAS ENGAGED in the Promethean project of building a library for the nation, many millions of its people were mired in poverty. It was in these years of class conflict and economic terror that the public library movement swept through Britain, as the nation’s progressive elite recognized that the light of cultural and intellectual energy was lacking in the lives of commoners. The Napoleonic Wars had ground away at the British economy, and a host of stifling taxes and laws placed the greatest burdens on the working class. In 1838, the second of two years of depression, the London radical William Lovett offered Parliament a bill he called the People’s Charter. Its six points, which included universal male suffrage and the end of property qualifications for election to government, were aimed at making Parliament answerable to a wider segment of Britain’s growing population than ever before. Parliament rejected Lovett’s bill, but the Chartist movement was born; it would articulate the hopes of Britain’s working poor through the revolutionary year of 1848.
\nLike the dissenting churchmen two hundred years before, the Chartists recognized the importance of education in fulfilling the aspirations of those excluded from power and position. Throughout Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, Chartist reading rooms—cooperative lending libraries offering books to members of radical organizations—sprang up. These proved extremely popular and soon competed with commercially minded subscription libraries, which for a typically modest fee offered their members access to an ever-changing list of books. \"
\n\"Although utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and his disciple John Stuart Mill were repelled by radical tactics, they supported Place’s view that greater access to information would benefit society as a whole.\"
\n\"Among a class of intellectuals who had begun to believe that economic phenomena followed the universal laws revealed by reason, it made sense that by greater access to information, all people could be trained in reason’s principles, turning themselves into rational actors for the greater good of all. As the library historian Alistair Black puts it, “through assimilation of the powers of reason, fostered by education, the masses would come to accept capitalist principles as truth. Education . . . taught men and women to buy in the cheapest markets and sell in the most expensive,...in effect, how to be ‘at one’ with the acquisitive nature of capitalist society.” Turning out such “good calculators” was the aim of utilitarian education, and the tradesmen’s reading rooms and subscription libraries offered the possibility of doing so in an economical fashion. For in a well-tended library, the utilitarians realized, each book’s value to society increases as more people gain access to and use it. Unlike the private book, whose functional use ends when it is read and placed on the shelf for the last time, a library book may continue to open doors. \"
\n\"EUROPE’S REVOLUTIONARY PANGS were felt in America, too, if in diluted form. The parents of Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, in fact, named their son after after the Hungarian reformer Lajos Kossuth, who in exile after his country’s 1848 revolution proved immensely popular as a lecturer. \"
\n\"Young Melville’s own ambitions were sparked by a real fire. When his school caught fire in 1868, Dewey found himself rescuing books from the smoldering library, inhaling a great deal of smoke in the process.\"
\n\"Efficiency became his obsession; he championed phonetic spelling, shorthand, and the metric system, believing that the key to unlocking enormous resources of time resided in a rationalizing simplicity. \"
\n\"The concern for classification itself did not originate with Dewey; indeed, it was a main topic among librarians of the day. Libraries were growing rapidly. The old system, in which each book was assigned a fixed spot on a shelf, would no longer do; each new addition of books required an overhaul of the entire catalog. In St. Louis, William Torrey Harris had hit upon the idea of classifying not the books but the knowledge they contained; such a system provided a scheme of relative classification, in which books were found according to their relationship to one another. Harris followed Bacon’s tripartite theory of knowledge, sorting books according to the disciplines of history, poetry, and philosophy. These branches of learning were amenable to further analysis, allowing an elaboration of the structure of knowledge that would cover all works of the mind.\"
\n\"In nineteenth-century libraries, meanwhile, systems had been developed like that used by the British Museum, in which the shelves were given numerical “names” that could be more or less arbitrarily divided up to note the location of specific books. Dewey’s innovation was to marry the two systems, the epistemological and the numerical. The numbers didn’t just designate a shelving system; they differentiated among fields of knowledge. Thus he joined the analytical simplicity of decimal numbers to an intuitive scheme of knowledge, one that would fluidly accommodate all the books ever written, and all the books that could be written as well. \"
\n\"he pioneered the systematic education of librarians, founding the first library school at Columbia in 1889; he launched a company, the Library Bureau, to peddle furniture and office supplies (and an entire, efficiency-minded aesthetic of interior design) to libraries big and small; in helping to found the American Library Association, he set standards for the profession, both internal (that is to say, in terms of expected education, ethics, and standards of work) and external (the role of the librarian in society as a whole). Dewey’s vigor, zeal, and indomitable personality contributed as much as the classification that bears his name to making him the most famous librarian of his or any other time. In many respects, this is unfortunate, for Dewey’s obsession with efficiency, his reliance on the mandate of authority and hierarchy, and his sociocultural and religious prejudices affected the development of the library in ways that haunt it to this day. \"
\n\"The reform-minded librarians wished to interpose themselves between the masses and the books, to provide guidance in appropriate kinds of reading. Dewey agreed with this motive. But he felt that to achieve it, libraries needed to focus less on the titles of the books they chose and more on the ways in which they organized those books and made them available. To a very great extent, this was a matter of the standardization of everything: not only the cataloging schemes but the size of cards and cabinets used in catalogs should be the same in all libraries.\"
\n\"Americans through the Colonial and Federal periods were highly literate. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin and members of his “Junto,” a Philadelphia literary soceity, formed the Library Company, offering access to books for the community; the Boston Athenaeum was founded in 1807. Throughout this time, libraries and literary circles sprang up in cities large and small, some wildly democratic, others self-consciously elitist. But American soceity grew and changed in the early 1800s; by midcentury, the descendants of those early literati were as concerned as their European counterparts with a perceived decline in the reading standards of the public at large. \"
\n\"It doesn’t have enough good books, the elite might say; it doesn’t have enough of our books. Indeed, there aren’t enough such books, and the elite will never write them fast enough, to survive dilution in the sea of the cheap, the tawdry, the “highly seasoned.”\"
\n\"Readers read books; librarians read readers. \"
\n\"An earlier generation of his colleagues and mentors had developed the professional mythology by reimagining class-based differences in reading taste (which were already imaginary—for rich and poor alike enjoy the cheap, the tawdry, and the “highly seasoned”) as stages in a developmental scheme. In the process, they reimagined themselves as intellectual physicians who would taxonomize the developmental processes of readers, and diagnose and treat their aberrations. In “Continuity,” however, all that progressive mythology is jettisoned. What remains is a social atomism in which each reader is cut off from others, and the librarian cut off from them all. The characters of “Continuity” are mired in their own foibles, and the librarian is distinctly modern in his awareness of this as he toils to create catalogs for readers who lack the intellectual wherewithal to make use of them. Librarians couldn’t hope to guide the people in their use of such titanic gifts as literacy and access to information. Ultimately, they could hardly lend a hand in the shaping of cultural tastes, for these move at the whim of larger and more climatic forces: all the manifold urges, distractions, and obstructions of modern life.\"
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