Card Catalog Rant

It's happened twice this week, and frankly I'm sick of it. Someone will start complaining about how much easier research was back in the days of the card catalog . . . and they haven't the slightest idea just how IGNORANT that makes them sound. Not in the sense that they don't know how to use the new, electronic databases, but they don't have a CLUE what academic research has looked like for the last century. Sure, in the past you could go to the library and thumb through a drawer of cards, pick out a title or two, and fetch the books off the shelf. And that was a perfectly reasonable way to do research--if you were in the 11th grade!
Real scholarly research has been dependent on peer-reviewed journal articles for decades and decades. In the old paper world that meant spending hours flipping through paper indexes--a different paper index for every single year. Interdisciplinary subjects could push you to several different indexes, one for each year.
It's not fun, and not that easy. I know. I've done it. You thumb through five years of indexes and then suddenly realize that maybe another subject heading might have been better. Do you go back? Do you pretend you did? Just picking the subjects is an adventure in futility. There's no natural language to help you out, no guide to the inner thoughts of those indexers except for that volume of alphabetized words. You have to search an index to search the index! Not to mention the fact that once you find your subjects, and see those beautiful entries listed beneath, you have to scan through all of them. You can't just tell the index to winnow the entries to precisely the ones you want. Why miss out on all that fun?
It makes me wonder why anyone would wish for those tactile, paper days. I still love to read a real, physical book, but reading is a sensual pleasure. Finding journal articles is a task, like scrubbing the toilet. It needs to be done, and can at times be satisfying upon completion, but no reasonable person wishes to throw away a faster, simpler way to do it. It astounds me each day that so much is now at my fingertips, that I can change my mind about a search term or focus, and have a new list of results in just a second or two, that the whole thing can be repeated at the drop of a hat, and that I can repeat it all at the drop of a hat.
I wish all these people would suck it up, spend the 20 minutes learning the technology, and stop pining for a Masters degree that is as research intensive as freshman English.