Paper Catalogs

I got an email today asking what ought to be the criteria for determining what catalogs we should keep and which we should pitch.  We're doing like a once a decade clean up in the TD classroom and catalogs are a fairly obvious decluttering target.

So I start to type back: "you can certainly pitch any duplicates, probably anything that looks like it is more than five years old - but put the ones that are going to go into a pile so Kevin and I can see them first so we don't lose something special."  But I stopped myself.  I'm wondering if the answer ought not be different. 

I'm thinking maybe: pitch everything.

The way we do our job has changed, and I think maybe it has left hardcopy catalogs behind.  Going to an industry convention used to include lugging around a bag full of company catalogs, now you shoot a photo of the booth with your phone and do a web search when you go back to work. 

I have a class where I talk about purchasing where I talk about a lot of what could only be considered vestigial technical design resources.  Usually I tell them about the Thomas Register - a hardcopy, 20 odd volume industrial directory where the contact information was as often as not a snailmail address - not even a phone number let alone an email.

Sometimes I tell them about a thing called "The Yellow Pages" and how you had to be savvy about where to look for ads because they wouldn't always turn up where you thought they ought to be.  These days when I encounter a phone book I am usually wondering why the person that left it for me isn't being charged with littering.  There is a high probability that nearly all of my current students have never once cracked a phonebook.

There used to be these thick, spiral bound industry guides like "800 Chicago Production Resource" or some such thing, and annual issues of "Theater Crafts" that was a dedicated industry resource.  I haven't seen an updated version of either of those in a while.  Some of the Penton magazines that come into the school do still do an annual buyers guide, but I think that's more about publishing momentum or ad sales than it is about utility.

I can remember getting my first Grainger catalog and somehow finagling my first McMaster-Carr catalog.  I used to spend some time every month or so filling out a document request card from "Hydraulics & Pneumatics" magazine so I could get more catalogs.  I couldn't have done my job without catalogs from Outwater and McNichols.

The web pretty much ended all that, yes?  Maybe pitch everything.