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