Back to the Stone Age.

For about half an hour today at the library we were without a functioning catalog, the website for which crashed sometime over the night. In a collection as vast as Widener's (and moreover, all of Harvard's), a trip to the catalog before heading to the stacks is not just a good idea, but absolutely essential. Even a subject that seems terribly small and specialized could have hundreds if not thousands of books under its heading here, so unless you know an individual book's call number the chances of finding it by browsing alone is next to nil.

Needless to say, this wrought total havoc upon our early-bird patrons and their hopes of jumping right into their day's research, who instead milled around the atrium nervously, waiting for the catalog to come back online. Of course they always could have gone up to the third floor, where our original card catalog - yes, the one with real index cards - now resides in semi-retirement. Although that catalog hasn't been updated in over ten years, it's still perfectly useful for anything acquired before the mid-90's, and many scholars here work almost exclusively with older materials anyway. So why not go to the cards? I remember using the card catalog during my very first visit to Widener. HOLLIS, the electronic version of the catalog, was already around and in use, but the librarians at that time were still faithfully maintaining the old-fashioned index as well.

Was it just an affectation on their part, or were the traditionally (though no longer) technophobic librarians actually hedging their bets, just in case the Silicon Revolution didn't pan out after all? Who knows. But eventually the digerati won out, and now we're just plain up a creak when HOLLIS decides to take the morning off. A pity!