From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2017 19:26:37 -0700

WIth thanks to many, here's a summary.

1.  Some still use it.  (There's a line of discussion about just how
much is in NUC pre-56 that has not been captured by digital catalog
projects esp. WorldCat.  Probably not much, but certainly something.
Nobody really had anything at all reliably quantitative to offer.)

2.  Some have pitched it.

3.  One has done what I incline to do, keep a few representative volumes.

4.  The whole set appears to be in Hathi from a U. Michigan copy and
Google Books quality scanning; that's a kind of problem because the
underlying product was a challenge -- a variety of scripts and
qualities of cards, then photographed, then reproduced, then scanned
by Google.  Some pretty muddy text in there, but for a focused
bibliographic search it's functional.

5.  The Big Ten has archived a master print good quality set for
long-term print preservation.

6.  For comparison, there are about 17,000 cards per volume, about
12.5M in the whole set.  The Bible reference was to the fact that the
available materials for "Bible" were a mess and so those four volumes
were skipped on the first pass while, presumably, work went on to
organize them, and then to everybody's credit, they came back at the
end a decade later and filled in just those four volumes.  Do the
math, that means that "Bible" alone ran to almost 70,000 cards.  If
anyone remembers how many cards were in a typical drawer, you could do
a little more math in that direction.   -- The Bible situation is a
reminder that at the limit there were always drawers that had become
unwieldy.  From my own experience, I remember that Cicero and
Shakespeare drawers were like that, where it made more sense to go to
the stacks and just look at the shelves to get a picture of what was
held.  That was an imperfect measure, but the catalog drawers had
gotten appreciably more imperfect.

7  A fair number of institutions have built temporary, often holiday,
trees in a lobby by stacking them pyramidically.

Again, great thanks to all.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU