card catalog cards:

I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss old-fashioned library card catalogs. Sure, speaking as a graduate student/researcher, data bases and online catalogs make the research process more effective and expansive.  But I do miss thumbing through the old catalog, and seeing just where in the library's collections those cards would lead me....

Although the University of Texas has done away with most of their old card catalog cabinets, there are still remnants of the old card catalog system at the different library branches.  In particular, the old cards can be easily found in boxes of scratch paper left out for library patrons. Stacks upon stacks of old library cards are scattered on the different floors of the Fine Arts Library so that patrons can jot down the call number for which they're looking. Working there, I use the old cards for a myriad of purposes, and am often tickled by which book's card I'm using. But last week, I discovered a stack that were interesting for a much more personal reason....

These cards were for the very Visual Resources Collection that I have been working on for the last several weeks! The cards described different slides that are part of the collection and included the very abbreviations that are at the center of this here project!

Notice the abbreviations "arch." and "anon."  According to the previously established abbreviation vocabulary, "arch." means "architecture" or "architectural" and "anon." means "anonymous." And these abbreviations make sense.  Both slides described are views of architectural structures, the first part of the Shinto Shrine, and the second slide is of an aerial view of the region of Mittelberg  in Austria. 

But other cards I found didn't use any abbreviations, instead using the full word in place of established abbreviations.

There are established abbreviations for "sculpture," "textiles," and "embroidery" ("sculp," "txtl," and "embr" respectively), but these cards don't use them. Were they written before the abbreviations were in place? Were the full words preferable for the card catalog? Were the abbreviations only being used for the slides? Did the cataloger just find it unnecessary?   

I ask these question not only out of curiosity, though that is certainly a large part of it. But also because these questions are the same I've been asking myself in compiling & rewriting the abbreviations. Do we really need abbreviations in a digital world where we aren't limited by the space offered by a slide? How easily translatable should these abbreviations be to the average patron? It seems for every question I find an answer for, a whole new realm of questions appears.