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How did people find information before smartphones? Cat Goetze (@askcatgpt) was able to ask a librarian this week, just in time for the Los Angeles Public Library Scavenger Hunt.
Works Cited
“Celebrating a Century of the Light of Learning.” Central 100 Celebration, www.lapl.org/central100. Accessed 21 Apr. 2026.
“The Evolution of the Card Catalog System.” Raymond Geddes, Raymond Geddes, 19 Apr. 2023, www.raymondgeddes.com/blogs/news/evolution-of-the-card-catalog-system?srsltid=AfmBOornTbe3x84j0L0H9em8TbakVCIGDc5Dp2Gw3ev-iZZ46MdqvwaW.
The Library of Congress, and Carla D. Hayden. “The Card Catalog Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures.” Chronicle Books LLC, 2021.
Transcript
Hi. I'm trying to spend less time on my phone, and it's making me realize how reliant I am on this technology. How did people find information in the analog era? Well, I'm no expert, and like most people, I'm pretty reliant on digital technology. But I might have a few ideas. Records of organization information go way bad, and a tablet identified as a library catalog found near the Sumerian city of Nippur was dated around the year February. Fast forward from tablets to scrolls to codex, and then maybe the biggest change, the invention of the modern printing yes, which increased the number of books vastly and necessitated a uniform process for organizing materials. The rank catalog system was used to find books by author, title, and subject. Unlike systems where items were recorded in a book and a new edition was released every year, the card catalogs were easily updated. At their height, the Library of Congress produced 79,000,000 cards that were distributed to libraries throughout the country, providing a consistent way for people to look up information. People are quite analog with simplicity, but this is complex. Absolutely. There's also information people would go to straight away, like looking up phone numbers in these phone books from the late nineteen hundreds, finding a world record, or a personal favorite mapping out directions using a Thomas Good, and even looking up websites. You know what you guys should do? You should do a scavenger hunt across all of the libraries in the city and then No can go to all of them and get a vintage catalog card and librarians at each of the libraries can put a stamp on them with the architectural design of that library, and you could do it to celebrate the centennial of the central library. Yes, Cat. We're already doing that. Oh. Well, can I have one? You can have a whole pack. Thank you. Wow. I've got a lot of driving ahead of me. I'm gonna go get some audiobooks.
