We've been using our Thursday social media posts to share some items from the Middletown Campus archives and their stories.
For a time, though, I thought it would be fun to share some older "technologies" that I've gathered from the library and from my personal items. I invite you to share your questions and/or memories about these items.
Now, I use the term technology fairly loosely, and in that term I include anything people invent to help them accomplish a task or purpose. So, you'll see some non-electronic items in the posts to come, starting with: the card sorter.
This amazing device was extremely helpful in libraries for sorting catalog cards (one is shown in the image above, nestled under "P"). In the olden days (I last did this in 1990), we did not have an online catalog of the books and other items we owned (like our current Books & More). Instead, we had a card catalog, composed of many cabinets with drawers of these little 3" x 5" cards. When shelving the cards, it was handy to sort them by call number first so that you could move in an orderly fashion among the catalog drawers. This card sorter allows for sorting by Dewey Decimal call numbers (the 000 through 900 numbers) or Library of Congress call numbers (the A to Z, though we tend to not use the letters I, O, W, or Y. Why not? Well, that's a story for another time).
The card sorter is of course useful for sorting other items as well (alphabetically or numerically). We have two in the library, but no need to sort cards. If you'd like to see a demonstration or borrow one, please stop on by.
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