CARD CATALOG TEAM

Mary Campbell
Natalie Castelan Marque
Charvez Johnson

PROJECT STATEMENT

    Our video begins with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges to help guide us through the questions of card catalogs' relationship to extinction. Borges’ quote suggests that libraries will remain after the extinction of humans, which prompts questions in our video regarding the relationship between human/ non-human extinction and the way we categorize the world around us in the form of card catalogs. We interviewed Bard College librarian, Betsy Cawley, and she shared anecdotes about her experience working in a library both before and after physical card catalogs, as card catalogs have gone “extinct” and are now fully digitalized. The interview emphasized that libraries are more than unbiased collections, “it’s what we think and what we think is important.” But what is the relationship to extinction? Using what we learned throughout the course and independent research we began to look into the question of what classifies an object or species to be extinct. Answering this question would lead us to an answer to our main question if card catalogs are considered to be extinct.

    We explored the concept of categorizations and the cataloging of information, and how that mediates our experiences of extinction in many ways. Overlapping and merging images creates a sense of the interactions between the concepts of extinction and cataloging. Contrasting images from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s vast arrangement of taxidermied, colorful birds (some of which are extinct) with the dull catalog cards to emphasize the visual similarities between these types of categorizing in their sense of expansiveness in the rooms filled with drawers. Similarly, the IUCN Red List and Bard’s online library catalog are quite similar in the ways in which you search information online and receive various results in an online list form. The video concludes with a video of the Hudson River in Tivoli, near to Bard’s campus. We wanted to localize the imagery in order to perhaps prompt a conversation about the local experiences of extinction in contrast to the vastness of information about it.

VIDEO CREDITS

Image and Video:

Chip Clark, Images from Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of National History Bird Collection
Ellen Su, Yale University Card Catalog Video (2012)
Sounds of Changes, Brussels Museum of Literature Card Catalog Video (2015)
IUCN Red List Website

Quoted Text:

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel (1941)

Narration (In-order of appearance):

Charvez Johnson
Natalie Castelan Marque
Betsey Cawley (Interview Excerpt)
Shannon Ryan

Video Editing:

Mary Campbell