card catalogs (wooden drawers, 3x5 cards)

How well I remember - that was the modern, new-fangled system at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. At one time as a grad student I was employed ordering up from the stacks original seventeenth-century broadsheets and tracts for a researcher. The only available catalogues were handwritten in great leatherbound tomes made in the nineteenth century. The pages had been cut out of older catalogues and pasted into the new. The handwriting was eighteenth-century. I spent so much time examining and reading the catalogues that I, er, was slightly remiss in ordering stuff for the researcher. Oh well.

But that was yesterday, and I am (obviously) a three-centuries-old vampire.