Being Carded in College

I used to work in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. Not just as a student, but as a part-time work-study employee in the Manuscripts and Archives Division.

As a place to walk into every day for a job, it’s hard to top Sterling. It was designed to look like a medieval cathedral, and the card catalogue was in a place of honor in the nave. (The checkout desk was the altar.)

Even while I was there in the mid-1980s, however, other work-study employees were transferring the data on those cards into a new computerized system.

Now the card catalogue is unused, but Ellen Su made this music video to honor it.