Next in our Throwback Technology series: the Rolodex! Same ground rules apply: I'll share some older "technologies" that I've gathered from the library and from my personal items. I will use a broad definition of technology to include anything people invent to help them accomplish a task or purpose. And, I invite you to share your questions and/or memories about these items.
So, back in the day, if you had a lot of people to stay in touch with, your options for keeping track of them would be limited to lists that you could write or type up. You might have an address book, perhaps spiral bound, with pages marked or with little tabs hanging out for letters of the alphabet. That would work all right as you went along and added names, but sooner or later you'd fill up all the space in the S or N or D pages, and then what do you do when you want to remember Kathy Nelson's address or phone number? It's a mess, even if sometimes you might be lucky and not have as many contacts in O as in N, and you could just start your overflow Ns after O'Neill, or something.
Starting in 1956, a new method arrived on the scene: the Rolodex (a portmanteau of "rolling" and "index"). Each individual contact you wanted to keep track of could be added on a small card that was attached to a turning spinner, creating a rotating group of cards that you could flip through to find your contact. Generally, people would alphabetize the contacts, and you could easily expand a given section of the alphabet as needed by just sticking another card in (rather than having to retype a list, or move to a bigger address book).
For librarians, used to organizing our book catalogs with cards that could be slotted and moved around in drawers to accommodate changes, an inflexible organization method like a list or address book just wouldn't do for our business contacts. So the Gardner-Harvey Library at some point in its early history invested in the Rolodex shown in the image above. It was a handy way for keeping track of contact information for our vendors and suppliers, as well as important contacts around the University. I believe that there were actually two different Rolodexes around when I started (I picture a smaller one with information about the many magazines and journals that we received). Of course, for the library as well as for many individuals and businesses out in the world, many electronic and online methods for tracking contacts have been developed over the years. The library Rolodex was moved into our technology archives some time ago. It is interesting to imagine using one to track down a phone number (and also building up a Rolodex over the course of a career). I remember starting work as a librarian in the mid-1990s and being given Rolodex cards at conferences by vendors and publishers to stick in my non-existent Rolodex.
I found a great article from 2020 in the Columbia Journalism Review by Merrill Perlman that provided some interesting history on the Rolodex and the dates and other facts I shared above. Rolodexes are still out in workplaces and homes somewhere (do you have one?), and the original manufacturer still sells them (though not at the 3" x 5" card size that we have). If you'd like to give our library one a spin, stop on by!
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