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In short, a card catalog provides a context for the book: it shows what the book
is about, and it also gives general bibliographic information. The card catalog
helps the researcher identify the right book to check out and where to find it.
Furthermore, each book has three (or more) cards referencing it, because each
card is in alphabetical order according to one of three different sort orders:
Title, Author, and Subject.
Here is what Todd Stephens, metadata expert and holder of many metadata
patents, has to say about the card catalog analogy:
For every system, interface, application, component, metric or whatever asset you
can define within ...