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How the Humble Index Card
Foresaw the Internet
A 3 x 5 history of the cards that helped catalog all of human knowledge in a
way anybody could use.
By Jonathan Schifman Feb 11, 2016 9.6k # $ %
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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Index cards are mostly obsolete nowadays. We use them to create flash cards, write
recipes, and occasionally fold them up into cool paper airplanes. But their original
purpose was nothing less than organizing and classifying every known animal, plant,
and mineral in the world. Later, they formed the backbone of the library system,
allowing us to index vast sums of information and inadvertently creating many of the
underlying ideas that allowed the Internet to flourish.
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The Invention
Organizing more than 12,000 animals, plants, and minerals is painstaking work.
Imagine having to do it by hand, let alone typing it all into Microsoft Excel.
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That's what Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, did for his book Systema
Naturae. Published in 13 editions from 1735 to 1770, Systema Naturae classified and
named organisms and minerals. It gave scientists an understanding of which species
were alike based on the number of shared categories.
Before publishing his taxonomies, Linnaeus had to organize everything himself. But
instead of writing his classifications in a book that could easily run out of space, he
put each organism and mineral on its own piece of paper. That way, Linnaeus could
have a file of everything he recorded. He could easily retrieve data on any organism
and mineral and reposition any of them that may have been placed in the wrong
spot. Most importantly, new discoveries could always be added as he published new
editions of Systema Naturae.
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SIMILAR IN SIZE TO A PLAYING CARD, THIS NEW TOOL
CALLED THE INDEX CARD WOULD BE USED FOR ONE THING
—CLASSIFYING, OR INDEXING, INFORMATION.
But about 30 years after publishing the first Systema Naturae, Linnaeus came up
withanother way to index his information: by putting all of the organisms and
minerals on smaller, thicker pieces of paper. Similar in size to a playing card, this
new tool would be used for one thing—classifying, or indexing, information.
How Dewey Did It
For thousands of years, if you wanted to find the best and most comprehensive
information about anything, you headed to a library. You just had to check two things
first: whether the library had the information you're looking for, and, if so, where to
find it. These days we can get this information from our computers in seconds, but as
recently as the 1990s, online catalogs were new and mostly unavailable, and that
meant combing through the card catalog to track down a book.
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Before libraries used cards, the catalogs were written in books, as if part of the
collection. Preceding catalog books were etched tablets, which were used in ancient
Babylon and Egypt. As time went on and collections grew, tablets and eventually the
catalog books ran out of space for new entries. They became cumbersome to
rewrite. So in 1791—about 30 years after Linnaeus' invention—librarians began
resorting to cards for their catalogs. The movement started in France during the
French Revolution. As revolution raged in the streets, an evolution in library
cataloging was also underway.
The French libraries initially used playing cards. But by the nineteenth century,
libraries in the United States and Europe began using index cards. Either way, the
transition to cards made the indexing of collections much easier. For each book the
library acquired, a new card simply could be added to the catalog.
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THE INDEX CARD MOVEMENT FOR LIBRARIES STARTED IN
FRANCE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. AS REVOLUTION
RAGED IN THE STREETS, AN EVOLUTION IN LIBRARY
CATALOGING WAS ALSO UNDERWAY.
The listings on these cards were bibliographical, with vital information like author
name and title. They also contained the book's approximate location, like a particular
shelf. But not every library organized its books and cards the same way—some
organized them based on thesize of the book, while others, like the Amherst College
library described in Colin B. Burke's Information and Intrigue, organized books and
cards based on author name. In both cases, the range of books on a shelf was
random. If you browsed through the library, you would find a novel next to a
geometry book.
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And then came Dewey.
Melvil Dewey was working at Amherst in the 1870s, and wanted to reorganize the
library. In 1873, he came up with what we know as the Dewey Decimal System. It
organized the books by subject, meaning that all geometry books would be together,
while classical Greek speeches would be in a different section. Each book was
assigned a unique number—a "call number"—that identified the book's subject
and exact location. Decimal points divided different sections of the call number. The
call number on the card matched a number written on the spine of each book.
This system caught on nationwide in the 1880s and is still used today. If you're old
enough, you probably remember learning the Dewey Decimal System in
school. Dewey's system organized the cards in cabinet drawers by subject, author
name and title, which meant that one book had multiple cards. The index cards also
contained brief descriptions of the books.
Librarians originally handwrote the bibliographies on each card. But in 1971, the
Ohio College Library Center began printing the text onto the index cards for them.
The OCLC distributed about1.9 billion cards before shutting the service down in 2015
—with today's online catalogs, there was little need to make more cards. The last
order was placed by Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y. as a backup to its own
online catalog.
Cataloging Everything Ever Published
Dewey's wasn't the only index card-based classification system over the years. The
Library of Congress has its own letter-based system. The number-based Universal
Decimal Classification, created by Paul Otlet at the turn of the nineteenth century, is
a more detailed version of Dewey's system. It had to be, considering it was created
to catalog everything ever published.
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Long before the verb "to google," Otlet and his friend Henri La Fontaine set out to
develop their own search engine in Brussels in 1895. They wanted to create the go-
to place for everyone to find information on absolutely anything. It would work just
like Google does today—you submit a query and get links to relevant sources of
information. In the 1895 version, you'd send queries by mail or telegraph and get
index cards with bibliographies in return.
BEFORE "GOOGLING" WAS USED AS A VERB, PAUL OTLET
AND HIS FRIEND HENRI LA FONTAINE SET OUT TO DEVELOP
THEIR OWN SEARCH ENGINE IN BRUSSELS IN 1895.
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The Belgian government provided Otlet and La Fontaine with funds and a building to
get started. They had to create a database of all the bibliographies themselves. To
do so, Otlet and La Fontaine collected as much data as possible on every book,
article, and photograph ever published. They also searched for items that libraries
didn't have, like pamphlets and posters. Using Otlet's Universal Decimal
Classification, the two men and their staff created an index card catalog with
bibliographies on every card. The cards were organized by author name and subject.
The subject cards contained descriptions of the item in addition to the bibliographies,
often requiring multiple cards. Each item usually had one card in the author cabinets.
The search engine service, called the Mundaneum, was a business. When you
submitted a query, the bibliographies and descriptions were copied from the
Mundaneum's cards onto new cards. The new cards were then sent to you, as long
as you paid a fee per card.
The Mundaneum had a catalog of about18 million index cards, which took 15,000
drawers to hold. This became overwhelming by the 1930s, just before the
Mundaneum's decline. The Belgian government stopped supporting the enterprise in
1934, and Otlet had to move the Mundaneum to a smaller building. Unable to meet
its costs, it closed shortly thereafter. Most of the cards were destroyed in a Nazi
invasion in 1940, and cabinets that once aligned the walls were replaced with
artwork.
As the Mundaneum entered its final stages, Otlet began to realize that the use of
index cards would eventually be impractical. It was an endless project—new
published materials required more cards and more space. In his 1935 book Monde,
he explained his belief that all information would one day be digitized, so that we
could see it on a screen at home. Inspired by inventions like telephones and
televisions, Otlet had predicted the existence of the Internet.
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The Mundaneum went through a couple of name changes over its 40-year life: it was
originally called the International Institute of Bibliography. It was then renamed the
Universal Bibliographic Repertory before being dubbed the Mundaneum. Remnants
of its card catalog still exist today at theMundaneum museum in Mons, Belgium.
IN HIS 1935 BOOK, HE EXPLAINED HIS BELIEF THAT ALL
INFORMATION WOULD ONE DAY BE DIGITIZED, SO THAT WE
COULD SEE IT ON A SCREEN AT HOME
The Index Card's Legacy
Otlet's idea of a digitized version of information wasn't just a prediction. It was a
dream. He and La Fontaine aimed to connect everyone around the world through
knowledge. Had he lived until 1989—he would have 121 years old by then—he
would've witnessed the invention of the World Wide Web.
But Otlet was one of the more unnoticed figures among the Internet's creators.
Vannevar Bush, an engineer, is credited with having the most direct influence on the
structure of the Internet. Like Otlet, Bush had also predicted a network connected by
hyperlinks in his 1945 essay "As We May Think."
Yet without the Mundaneum—and without Linnaeus' invention of index cards or
Dewey's library cataloging revolution—many of the basic concepts that underpin the
Internet may have taken years longer to put together. It's amazing how much the
information revolution we're still living in can be traced back to a simple 3" x 5" piece
of card stock.
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