the press. Updating such a catalog meant reprinting it in its entirely, or staving off an expensive new edition by producing supplementary volumes of newly acquired works, which then made searching quite tedious. In the mid-1800s the library card catalog was already winning hearts and minds. Although neither the book catalog nor the card catalog meets all needs as efficiently as one would desire, the card catalog had already proven itself as an up-to-date instrument for library users and librarians alike.Cards were lauded by Melvil Dewey (1851–1931) in his introduction to early editions of his Decimal Classification, although his classification and “relativ index” in no way required the use of a card system. However, the “Co-Operation Committee” of the newly formed American Library Association (ALA) announced its decision on the standardization of the catalog card in 1877; not coincidentally, Dewey’s library service company, The Library Bureau, founded in 1876, was poised to provide the cards to libraries at a cost lower than custom-produced card stock.The typewriter brought greater uniformity to the card catalog than even the neatest “library hand” could, and undoubtedly increased the amount of information that one could squeeze into the approximate three-by-five surface. When the Library of Congress (LC) developed printed card sets using the ALA standard size and offered them for sale starting in 1902, the use of the card catalog in US libraries was solidified.After Dewey, the person who had the greatest effect on library technology was Henriette Avram (1919–2006), creator of the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format. This was not only an innovation in terms of library technology, it was generally innovative in terms of the computing capability of the time. In the mid-1960s, when MARC was under development, computer capabilities for handling textual data were very crude. For example, look at a magazine mailing label. You will see uppercase characters only, limited field sizes, and often a lack of punctuation beyond perhaps a hash mark for apartment numbers. This is what all data looked like in 1965. However, libraries needed to represent actual document titles, author names, and languages other than English. This meant that the library data record needed to have variable length fields, full punctuation, and diacritical marks. Avram delivered a standard that was definitely ahead of its time. Although the primary focus of the standard was to automate the printing of cards for LC’s card service, Avram worked with staff