he replied by making a point that seems to me undeniable: “I guess what we’re really doing is we’re having a short Dark Ages of scribalism as we transcribe from the original records into the electronic form. There’s going to be that same blot on the historical record in our age as there was in the Middle Ages.”

I have no doubt that Dale Flecker believed what he was saying when he told me that “the machine catalogue is in almost no cases worse and in most cases better than the card catalogue was.”