The Ballad of Broadsides and Punched Cards

by Katie Zondlo

The Cotsen Children’s Library has a well-established recycling program involving the entire Princeton University Library (PUL). PUL staff from across campus regularly drop off donations of toilet paper and paper towel tubes, oatmeal containers, tissue boxes, tea tins and contact lens boxes, among other items, that are later used to build craft projects during our outreach programs.

We are also occasionally given something a little out of the ordinary, which is why I initially didn’t pay much attention to a smallish box that had “Broadside Ballad Cards” written on the side. What I eventually discovered were hundreds of Princeton University Computer Center punched cards dating back to April 1975. Intrigued by the donation and refusing to take offense to recyclables that are a few months older than me, I started digging deeper into this library relic from the not-so-distant past.

Computer punch or punched cards were an early method of storing computer data or information. Holes were punched into the cards in specific lines and patterns, and each punch stored information to be adapted into machine language by a specialized card reader. Depending on the program, there could be thousands or even hundreds of thousands of cards to be punched and scanned. The paper cards were the precursor to floppy discs, hard drives, USB flash drives, and cloud storage. 

Fanning through the punched cards, I randomly pulled out three with the same end number, 1122, and started an online search for more information. The National Library of Scotland offered the first breakthrough answer with an article about the history of Scottish broadsides and ballads. The story provided a link to the library’s digitized collection of broadsides, appropriately called “Word on the Street”, dating between 1650 and 1910. 

The printer listed on my chosen cards, James Lindsay of Glasgow, had nearly 400 results to sift through, so I did a title search of both “Lover’s Discussion” and “Free and Easy”. I found “Free and Easy” and learned it was printed sometime between 1852-1859. Armed with this new information, I searched the Princeton University Library catalog, which revealed A Collection of English, Scottish and Irish broadside ballads. 

I headed down to the Special Collections reading room inside Firestone Library and sorted through two large archival document boxes containing a vast array of news, songs, speeches and scandals. Tucked inside folder number 1122 was the document that started my modern-day treasure hunt. It turns out “Lover’s Discussion” and “Free and Easy” were on the same sheet of browning paper. Following the traditional way broadsides were printed, the two stories appeared on one single page.

Sharing the eureka moment with Library Collections Specialist Adrienne Rusinko, I made an offhand comment about how fun it would be if I could find the original paper card catalogue for the collection. Adrienne told me the Firestone Library card catalog had been decommissioned after being digitally scanned, but she recollected the scans were available somewhere within PUL in a separate image database.

In 1992, PUL embarked on a massive conversion project to scan 6.5 million paper cards and create a digital catalog, which at the time was the largest image database created for a library. And while PUL is not the largest university library in the world, it has more books per enrolled student than any other university in the United States. It took a deep dive into PUL’s password protected online recesses, but I successfully located the database that contained scanned images of the broadsides paper catalogue cards. Clicking through the hundreds of scanned paper cards until I found record PR1181. xc6f, I was reminded of how much time I spent as a pre-Internet student thumbing through my neighborhood or school library long card catalogue drawers, which were usually (mostly) alphabetized.

After moving the library records online, PUL’s retired wood card catalogues were dismantled from everyday use and have been given a new life as a stunning art installation on the first floor of Firestone Library. Walking by the hundreds of catalog drawer fronts always gives me pause to the “good old days” of doing research in a library, when finding where a book was shelved could quite possibly take longer than finding the book itself.