Punched cards and their uses in Hungarian libraries

Abstract

Origins and basic principles of punched card techniques and data processing. Use of punched cards for statistical analysis. Accounting operations by the data processing machines.
Informations noted on the cards in form of punched holes can be printed on paper by the tabulator. So the cards can be regarded as a special kind of setting of printed informations. This setting material (i. e. the very cards) can be sorted on the sorter machine, collated for any desired pairing or amended with new cards on the collator and, finally, printed on paper for transmitting the print to master sheet of the photo-offset process.
In Hungarian libraries punched card techniques are used to statistical as well as printing works. Application of statistical kind is to be found in the Central Technical Library of Hungary, where accessions of 1961 were processed on punched cards and analysed statistically.
In the Gorkij-Library white cards are used for typewriting the accession data on them. The cards arranged by hand and displaced on each other can be photographed for the accession list and statistical data can be also punched on the free portions for sorting or statistical analysing.
The Central Library of the Polytechnical University, Budapest makes its college notes catalogue by puncbed cards. The bibliographic data are punched on cards in abridged form, the cards sorted in the required sequence and listed on paper sheets. The new accession cards complete the stock and a new list renders the preceding one unnecessary.
In the Technical Documentation and Translation Bureau of the Ministry of Heavy Industry the accession list of periodicals is made by punched cards. Each card contains max. 35 alpha-numerical notations plus a sorting code for bringing the one-line-cards in the required sequence. Both the periodical titles and the library names have interruption serial numbers, so new numbers can be asserted when needed. The listed information can be published by offset process without showing the code numbers. Next year the new accession list completed with new items can be printed by using the former "setting", which is stored in form of punched cards.