Search Is So 1780
Search Is So 1780
Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful
Today in 1803, Gottfried Freiherr van Swieten died in Vienna.
Van Swieten was an Austrian diplomat, librarian, and government official and an enthusiastic amateur musician. He is best remembered today as the patron of several great composers of the Classical era, including Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
As there were no music recordings in the 18th century, Van Swieten was instrumental in introducing his contemporaries to the works of the Baroque masters which he collected extensively. Van Swieten had invited Mozart to visit him regularly, in order to inspect and play his manuscripts of works by J. S. Bach and Handel, which he had acquired during his diplomatic service in Berlin. Mozart wrote to his father Leopold on April 10, 1782:
I go every Sunday at twelve o'clock to the Baron van Swieten, where nothing is played but Handel and Bach. I am collecting at the moment the fugues of Bach—not only of Sebastian, but also of Emanuel and Friedemann.
From 1777 to 1803, Van Swieten was the prefect of the Imperial Library. In 1780, he introduced the world's first card catalog. Van Swieten's innovation of using cards permitted new entries to be freely added in a conveniently searchable order.
After seeing a card catalog in the Iowa State University library in 1882, Thomas B. Wales, the first secretary of the Holstein-Friesian Association of America, applied the idea to the 40,000 animals in the Holstein-Friesian Herd Book. Noted Edward Tenner: “Here was a ‘cattle log’ in the truest sense.”
Foreshadowing the rate of growth of digital information a century later, Wales estimated that the number of new cards will double every two years. Today, the Holstein Association USA maintains records on over 22 million registered Holsteins.