BAKER'S SMUDGES

摘要

In 1994, novelist Nicholson Baker published an article in The New Yorker called "Discards," a fervent defense of the library card catalog, then rapidly being replaced by the online catalog. He focused on the richness of the information contained on those cards, which often bore the traces of decades of painstaking notation and correction by catalog librarians. Much of that information was lost when cards were converted to online catalogs, a hollow victory of efficiency over scholarship, in Baker's view, made more galling by the enthusiasm some librarians expressed for the retirement of their old catalogs.