crickey. catalog cards

homesteadcard
I am easily amused, this is true. But really, this is cool. There’s no other word for it.

John Blyberg is a librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library. He’s clearly somebody with imagination and technical skills both, because he programmed a special feature for the AADL online catalog. With the click of a button you can generate a catalog card for the book you’ve looked up. Like this one, here. Of Homestead. Here’s the link to this card’s page — and you’ll note that you can add your own marginalia. In handwriting. I am such a geek, but I love this.

If you’re a more talented geek than I am, he’s made the code available for people to work with. It’s a good thing I don’t know how to program, because I’d never get any writing done at all if I could customize this for myself.

Along the same lines, library people in various places are trying to preserve some of the old catalog cards for their own sake. This takes me right back to the Lincoln Avenue branch of the Chicago Public Library.