Containing Dickens, Indexing Drood

librarian of Harvard College began work on a new project to catalogue the library's collection using alphabetically-arranged cards, the rst index of its type.Abbot had the support of the head librarian John Langdon Sibley, who provided funds for a workforce of women who, for an hourly rate of six cents, would to log the title, author and subject of every work onto 2#$#5#inch cards.A year later, with!35,762 cards written, a part of the catalogue was made accessible to the general public.And yet!the end was still a long way o%.The full catalogue would be another eight years in the making.At last, in 1870, the process reached its conclusion, and the!modern card index had come