ANNALS OF SCHOLARSHIP about the scrapping of library card catalogues and replacing them with computerized systems. Tells how various libraries, including the New York Public Library, Harvard, and others, have discarded their index card files and replaced them with inferior on-line systems. Tells about the Online Computer Library Center, which computerizes card catalogues. On-line catalogues are wonderful things in principle. Without on-line catalogues and the circulation and acquisition modules of software with which on-line catalogues are linked, libraries would simply not have been able to process all the books and journals that were arriving on their loading docks. Tells about the history of card catalogues, beginning in 1791 with the French Revolution, when the government asked for names of books confiscated and stated that information should be written on playing cards and returned to the central government. In January of 1901, the Library of Congress began printing its catalogue cards in quantity and selling them in sets to any library that wanted them. Writer visits OCLC. The cost of computer technology now consumes nearly 30 per cent of the typical American library's budget, according to one estimate, forcing it to cut book purchases, reference staff, and skilled cataloguers. The technology that libraries are actually buying turns out to remedial software meant to correct the hash that earlier technologies have made of information once safely stored on paper. Tells how some librarians are saving their paper card catalogues and about artist Tom Johnson, who is saving Harvard's discarded Widener library cards. Maybe the riskiest, most thought-provoking piece of conceptual art that anyone could create out of these found materials is the original card catalogue, enclosed in its own cabinets, sitting undisturbed somewhere within the library it once described.