it was wonderful and i miss the card catalog. searching on a computer is not the same thing at all. the card catalog let you /browse/.

and the more i think about it, the more i come to the conclusion that humans are inveterate browsers. search is fine if you know what you want, but browsing is how you figure out what you want.

bring browsing back!

Public libraries still have books, movies, and games that you can borrow for free. Going from card catalogs to electric catalogs was great and the Internet was amazing. My, probably bad, xennial take is that web2.0 is where it started to go wrong. The original web was too decentralized and chaotic for a corporate takeover but 2.0 was pretty much built to allow corporations to seize control.

I grew up with these as an Xer, so I know what it was like trying to find a book with them. Modern library catalogs are so much nicer to use. But I'm still a huge fan of the Dewey Decimal System. And when you find a library that still stamps the due date in the books, it's great seeing the last time someone has borrowed a book, especially if its been a long time, I borrowed one book of essays in grad school 2019, it was acquired in 1988 and I it felt great to be the first person to borrow it. The book wasn't even one I was looking for but it was on the shelf beside the one I was after and it looked interesting, and it turned out to be great.

You could ask your local library if they still have their index available. I know mine doesn't update it anymore, but they haven't removed it either.

Well, if you lived in a small town like I did, you didn't have stuff like this. And we weren't strictly poor, but money was a lot tighter back then (1980s). My mum sewed a lot of our own clothes for instance, besides the job she had. We were one of the few families from our town who went to Italy for holidays though.

I think the major difference you might be looking for is tasks/media that are paced and motivated by the person doing/consuming them, and for that I heartily recommend books.

audio books are generally fine, but this is the key thing they lack. ebooks do this fine as long as the device youre reading on isn't networked. read some 'art in the age of mechanical reproduction' and 'society of the spectacle', then just some Utopian fiction, maybe start with le'guinn.

its not the time. its not even the specific technologies. it's the characteristics of the implementation of them. refine what you're longing for. try shit out. don't put on the nostalgia goggles.

This very much still exists in many libraries especially ones in Japan.

It was awful and I don't miss it at all.

Being able to read any book without going to the library, let alone getting off the toilet, is a fucking miracle and anyone who makes that more difficult should be viewed with contempt by every intellectual.

Nothing peaceful about spending 2 hours finding a book, finding a citation about a fact you were interested in, thinking, 'did so and so really write that?!' and then having to wait 3 weeks for an interlibrary loan only to discover that the author did, in fact, make it up in the first place and add a citation to make it appear that it was fact.

Books are peaceful, reading is great, I prefer reading on paper, I don't miss the part of the process the card catalog was involved in.

So most of the time, it was like this.

What was great about card catalogs and physical dictionaries is that you would find things that you'd never thought of.

Start looking for 'Magellan' and end up with books on 'magic.'

The worst part is when all this was first being digitized it was actually magnificent and worked beautifully.

Then came the ads...