The other day a patron was looking for a book and couldn't find it in the catalog. He told us that we missed the old card catalogs, because "these computers make a lot of mistakes." We nodded politely to him, but secretly I was laughing to myself. Yes, sir, card catalogs were much more accurate than this pesky computers. They never lost records because a card got lost or misplaced or a patron just took it with them. Nope. When you needed to know where a book was, the card catalog knew, by golly.
I understand where these patrons are coming from. I know that computers can be scary, and that it's frustrating when the computer catalog doesn't find what you want. We've had some problems with some of our computers not displaying the call numbers, and that drives the patrons crazy. Card catalogs would never refuse to display call numbers!
But on the other hand . . . most of the inaccuracies are human error, just as they were in the old card catalogs. The difference is that one way or another, eventually you can find the record on a computer - or sometimes, if it's appropriate for the need of the patron, you can find the record at another library, via OCLC and WorldCat. In seconds, I can tell the patron if their rare book is available for Interlibrary Loan, because I can see exactly which libraries have it.
And then there's the part where they can access the OPAC from home. It's not a perfect system - the other day a guy came in and said there were supposed to be two copies of a book available, and we couldn't find either because they were probably out being used by other students who waited to write their report until the last day. But lots of people can browse our catalog before coming in to the library, and they can browse if by whatever keywords they want to use. Try doing that with a card catalog.
