All Intensive Purposes

Nicholson Baker wrote some great stuff a few years ago about card catalogs, lamenting that libraries were discarding them in favor of computerized resources. But this puts those articles in a different light:

In 1995, Stanford founded the HighWire Press, which now provides electronic access to more than a thousand scholarly journals. A few years later, Stanford digitized most of its card catalogue, and circulation of its books increased by fifty per cent. "Once our students could sit in their dorm rooms and find out what we had in the library, they sought out more books," Michael Keller, the university librarian, says.

Jeffrey Toobin, "Google's Moon Shot," The New Yorker 30, 34 (Feb. 5, 2007).