The University of Virginia is in the midst of a major library renovation – a project that posed a unique problem – what to do with the old card catalog. Four million cards had been in storage since UVA switched to an electronic system, but some scholars were not ready to toss the paper record.
Thirty years ago UVA went through four thousand drawers , copying information from little white cards into a database called Virgo. The old collection was then put in storage.
“It just sat up here in the hallway,” says University Librarian John Unsworth. He figured it would cost three quarters of a million bucks to scan both sides of those cards – money the university hadn’t budgeted. But librarians often wrote interesting information about a book on the flip side of cards. Which copies, for example, came from Thomas Jefferson’s original collection, and which ones were donated after a fire destroyed much of the library in 1895.
“Two thousand volumes were given by one individual, and that information is not online,” says graduate student Samuel Lemley. He and his colleague Neal Curtis organized a rescue.
“Sam and I were walking by the Alderman Library, and we were kind of talking about what a shame it was that we were going to lose this essential resource for understanding the history of the UVA library system," Curtis recalls. "We kind of decided right there that we should come up with some kind of cost- efficient plan to keep the card catalog.”
In an eight-page proposal, they set the stage. Fifty students, faculty and staff would help load the cards into about 760 cartons to be stored in a warehouse until UVA gets the money to upload them to the online catalog.
“Who knows?" Curtis reasons. " Maybe in ten years digitization will become even cheaper and faster, and it’ll be feasible to digitize all the information that’s held on the cards.”
In the meantime, library director Unsworth says, this process helped the university find thousands of missing books.
“You know books get picked off the shelf and never checked out, put back not in the right place," he explains. "We did an inventory in the run up to the move, and found about 40,000 volumes.”
That number might seem like a lot, but UVA has about five million books in its library system. One of the missing books is important to UVA’s history – a volume signed by one of its founders. Curtis came across the card, but Lemley says there was no electronic record of its existence.
“That information didn’t make it into Virgo, which is the online public access catalog here," says Lemley. "If the card catalog were to be lost, that information would be lost along with it.”
Fortunately, Curtis tracked the book to UVA’s special collections library.
Then there were other intriguing discoveries.
“Evan Cheney, who’s a colleague of mine in the English Department and who has been helping box up cards found a rubber duckie that had been used as a placeholder in one of the drawers," he recalls. "Logan Heiman found a nail clipper.”
There’s no word on what will happen to those items, but Unsworth says one cabinet from the old catalog will be kept for display in the newly renovated library – expected to open in three years.
Lemley and Curtis oversaw about 500 hours of work getting boxes made, filled and labelled. No one got paid, but Curtis says he’s glad to have done it – to preserve a valuable resource for future historians who study UVA, and just for fun.
“This is definitely a team effort," he concludes. "Sam and I have made a lot of new friends.”
