New today: my library entered the twenty-first century a few years late, and finally got its catalog online! I spent my free time yesterday investigating the new online services. So we're a little late, lol, when I moved here they were still using card catalogs in the lobby. :-)
I am so glad, because it's going to save me hours of in-library time, and part of me wishes they'd done it sooner!
However, I am feeling a little nostalgic too. Does anyone miss the old-fashioned card catalogs, and pulling out the whole drawer to search for what you want, and standing with several drawers open at once? Or the satisfying little "clunck" sound when the old-fashioned stamping machine stamped the cards? Did anyone else have the cardstock cards with a little metal piece on it, and if you left it in the pocket of your jeans and washed it, and just returned the metal strip, they would only charge you half the cost of replacing your card? What about trying to find articles for school papers using the big fat green periodical index books? OK, sure, it took a lot longer, but somehow it seemed more "hands-on". Maybe I just view all that old-fashioned stuff through the eyes of the little girl who escaped to the library as often as possible, thinking it was a wonderland, a place of miracles, where anything could happen and I could go anywhere. Security to me as a child was being back in the stacks where no one could see me, surrounded by books. There was a lady librarian there, in the magical library of my childhood, who even entered into my fantasies by tiptoeing back to me, whispering that I might like to take a trip somewhere, and pointing out a book she thought I'd like. I read everything in the children's section by the time I was nine, sometimes several times over (yes, it was a small library) and moved "upstairs" where this librarian would simply frown at me if I chose a book she considered inappropriate, and I'd obediently go put it back (although sometimes I'd peek to see if I could figure out why it was forbidden, LOL)
I read some of my favorite books over and over and over again, never tiring of them. How many times did I read the Lambs' Shakespeare stories? The Betsy-Tacy books? The Story of the von Trapp Family Singers? I have no idea. I wish I could find the titles of some other favorites for which I simply do not remember enough identifying details to locate now, for I'd hunt them down and buy them if I did. There was a large volume of stories of all the English queens, illustrated--it was beautiful! I'd read of the "Chere reine crosses" and Henry the 8th's wives, Boadicea and Victoria, over and over. I also loved a compilation of stories of ballerinas--Anna Pavlova, Maria Tallchief--for an ungainly girl in the middle of a wheat field, it made anything seem possible. Oh, and a volume of stories of ice skaters---older ones, like Carol Heiss, and I'd dream of someday finding the thing that I was good at, was meant to do.
The library was my refuge from a sometimes disturbing reality, a "safe place", a second home. At one point, when I was attending the junior high across the street from the library, I'd beg my father to please let me go to the library after school, missing the bus, and have him pick me up on his way home from work at 5. He always suspected I was really trying to see a boy---but I wasn't. Who needed boys? I needed books.
Now I have both. A pretty good life. :-)