“The card catalogue,” as Tom Delsey, of the National Library of Canada, wrote in 1989, “exhibited a relatively high tolerance for deviation from literal and logical norms. . . . Typographical errors or inconsistencies in headings could be silently corrected in the process of filing the card; added entries that did not match exactly the corresponding main entry on the card to which they were related could nevertheless be placed in their proper sequence in the file.”
the benefits of the actual filing process can subtly correct for errors in categorizing