Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929

Chapter 7. Transatlantic Technology Transfer

7 Transatlantic Technology Transfer The principles of the Library Bureau equipment are currently conquering the world. —Paul Ladewig, Politik der Bücherei Throughout the nineteenth century, the practice of using index cards not occasionally but permanently in cataloging large book collections spreads among European libraries, finding its way across the Atlantic into the New World, to be naturalized after 1861 as a new technique accessible to a general audience. Ezra Abbot could be said to have sponsored its green card. Already in 1877, one year after its foundation, a delegation from the American Library Association departs for Europe to found a subsidiary in the United Kingdom. Melvil Dewey and his future wife are among the travelers; they meet during idle hours aboard, bonding over card games.1 The delegation succeeds in establishing the British Library Association, which remains closely linked to its American parent. Yet the index card principle is recognized much more slowly in European libraries, so that the American delegation’s suggestion to dismiss traditional bound catalogs in favor of the reimportation of loose card catalogs—insofar as the group aspires to such missionary efforts—is met with resistance. Though catalogs are by then accepted as universal search engines, they remain fixed in the library paradigm of the bound book.2 Library employees continue listing new entries systematically in bound catalogs and their supplemental volumes. The following part of this study aims less at reconstructing the extensive and passionate debate that finally yields to the triumph of the card index over bound catalogs3 than at sketching the dissemination of the American indexing technique in the Old World. Largely stripped of its provenance, the card index reenters Europe via two channels. On the one hand, the American business community vouches for the latest office 108 Chapter 7 machines and above all the card index as a time- and labor-saving device, transferring the early scientific management ideas of Frederick W. Taylor and Frank B. Gilbreth into the office.4 On the other hand, a massive European demand for new library technologies develops independently of the office innovation realm, owing to the construction and renovation of large national libraries. Supplying Library Supplies The Library Ge-stell5 From a library perspective, the second half of the nineteenth century is an era of construction. In 1854, a new phase of library architecture begins with the extension of the British Museum. Here, the architectural modern age meets growing storage needs by means of building stacks that no longer rely upon representative shelving, but obey the form dictated by shortage of space and the need for optimal access. In 1859, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris follows the principles established in London, lowering ceiling heights and furnishing shelves that no longer hug the walls, but “stretch out like feelers into the middle of the space.”6 This French-English model dominates the designs of a first wave of enlarged library buildings in Germany. The administrators of university or state libraries in Rostock (1866), Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Halle, and Göttingen (1878) are convinced by the new paradigm, even before construction technology between 1890 and 1915 allows buildings to become one big bookshelf.7 The system proposed by a Strasbourg locksmith named Lipmann is first applied in Marburg, then improved in Gießen and Tübingen before eventually being installed in the imposing new Royal Library in Berlin, Unter den Linden.8 Lipmann’s concept consists of a multistoried bookshelf resting on iron abutments. “The essence of modern technology lies in enframing.”9 The individual shelves can be hung according to the formats of books, and like false ceilings they can be placed flexibly in prefabricated recesses. Librarians need neither ladders nor detours to retrieve books from the collection: “Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”10 The cramped situation in the largest library in Berlin comes to its longawaited end with the inauguration of the new building by His Majesty, Transatlantic Technology Transfer 109 Emperor Wilhelm II, on his birthday in 1914. In the old buildings near the Opera, complaints about the shortage of space had accumulated, not least with respect to the catalog room: “Between two large cabinets in front of an admittedly wide interior window overlooking the courtyard stood, very cramped indeed, no less...