By Markus Krajewski
This present day on nearly each table in each place of work sits a working laptop or computer. 80 years in the past, pcs have been outfitted with a nonelectronic information processing computer: a card dossier. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski lines the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable components (file playing cards) that turned ubiquitous in workplaces among the area wars. the tale starts off with Konrad Gessner, a sixteenth-century Swiss polymath who defined a brand new approach to processing info: to chop up a sheet of handwritten notes into slips of paper, with one truth or subject according to slip, and organize as wanted. within the overdue eighteenth century, the cardboard catalog turned the librarian's resolution to the specter of info overload. Then, on the flip of the 20 th century, enterprise followed the expertise of the cardboard catalog as a bookkeeping software. Krajewski explores this conceptual improvement and casts the cardboard dossier as a "universal paper computing device" that accomplishes the elemental operations of Turing's common discrete laptop: storing, processing, and shifting information. In telling his tale, Krajewski takes the reader on a few illuminating detours, telling us, for instance, that the cardboard catalog and the numbered road deal with emerged whilst within the similar urban (Vienna), and that Harvard University's home-grown cataloging process grew out of a librarian's laziness; and that Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey Decimal procedure) helped lead to the know-how move of card documents to enterprise.
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Extra info for Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929 (History and Foundations of Information Science)
Sample text
Its paper slip form in Wolfenbüttel in Leibniz’s time nevertheless remains only one temporary aid, again gathered and bound into the printed catalogs that librarians value more highly than fleeting slips of paper. Only an accident, as the next chapter will demonstrate in detail, will unexpectedly turn this procedure into a permanent order. What remains pivotal, however, is the relation between index and book, which implies both temporary and permanent cataloging. For in contrast to the fixed entries of a continuous list on sequentially linear pages, paper slips can be reconfigured as freely mobile units in ever new arrangements.
The library becomes a bearer of capital, a data bank, lending information as if it were credit. The latter is reliably paid back in the indexing of new writings, whose contents in turn feed on the old ones. In 1716, Leibniz dies and the library at Wolfenbüttel falls into neglect, catalogs are carelessly kept, and the probability of discovering a text with the help of the book catalogs dwindles. In the course of the eighteenth century, finding anything in a library that has inadequate catalogs remains a challenge—not just in Wolfenbüttel, but everywhere else as well.
106 These confiscations require finding a way to tell the nation what belongs to the nation. General stocktaking begins in 1790, stopping a sell-off of the books—mostly for the mere price of paper—and keeping them in public libraries. On October 16, 1790, a committee is formed that devotes itself twice a week exclusively to the question of the mobile goods of the church, particularly what to do with books and art. 107 As proposed by one of its members, Louis-François-de-Paul Lefèvre d’Ormesson, the committee pursues the idea of compiling a national bibliography of all French books on the basis of inventory lists in the individual districts.
