The Classroom is now open. - by Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS

The Classroom is now open.

Structured lessons, a searchable library, and the next chapter of Card Catalog.

Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS

Jun 23, 2026

Today’s the day! The Card Catalog Classroom is open, which means this week’s essay is taking a back seat to an announcement that’s been a long time coming.

The Classroom is a private learning space on Circle where the ideas and resources shared across Card Catalog articles and Notes are organized into a searchable library and built into structured lessons with hands-on exercises. It’s a place to work through skills and explore organized resources at our own pace, with everything available to come back to whenever we want.

The Classroom is a living library, and like any library, the collection grows over time. Each Lesson is built from one of Card Catalog’s articles: where the article explains an idea, the Lesson is a way to put that idea into practice.

New lessons are added regularly, organized across four learning domains:

The first lesson available is Use AI to Sharpen Our Thinking, built from the article How to Use AI to Make Us Smarter.

Alongside the Lessons is the Reference Collection. If we’ve ever read a Note, bookmarked a resource, or thought “ I know she shared something about this!” and couldn’t track it down again, all of that now lives inside the Classroom too. Every archive, database, tool, framework, and recommendation ever shared in Card Catalog Notes has been organized into a searchable directory of 16 categories:

Good information is findable information, and the Reference Collection is what that looks like in practice. New resources are added every week as new material is shared in Notes.

We also have an Archives section that holds every AI Briefing, Librarian Hotline, and Research Packet ever published, gathered in one place inside the Classroom. New ones will still go out on Substack as they’re written, and they’ll show up in the Classroom Archives at the same time.

Photo by Andre Tan on Unsplash

A note for paid subscribers

If you’re already a paid subscriber, you already have access. Circle will be sending an invitation email in the next few days to set up an account. The email comes from Circle directly, so keep an eye on the inbox (and the spam folder, in case it lands there). Once the link is clicked and a password is set, your Classroom is open.

On pricing

Paid subscriptions move tomorrow from $8 a month and $80 a year to $10 a month and $100 a year. The original deadline was today, but the lower rate is staying available through the end of the day for anyone still considering. Subscribing by midnight Pacific tonight means paying the lowest price for the life of the subscription. Anyone who's already a paid subscriber keeps the rate they signed up at, always.

Beyond the individual subscription

Most paid subscribers join as individuals, but a growing number of subscribers use Card Catalog inside larger contexts: organizations, departments, and teams where the work of evaluating information, using AI well, and doing careful research is part of the job. For anyone who’d like to make the case for employer reimbursement, there’s a request template available. Group subscriptions are also available at 25% off the individual rate for any number of seats a team needs.

Both options, plus full descriptions of every Reference Collection category and what subscribers are saying about the work, are walked through here:

🔑 The Classroom

The Classroom is an expansion of what paid subscribers receive, built so the resources, frameworks, and ideas Card Catalog has been sharing aren’t just things to read once and lose track of. The articles will still come every week, free for everyone who reads them, and the Notes continue too. What’s new is a space where the threads connect: where every resource on a single subject sits together in one view, where an article on source evaluation has a companion lesson that puts the skill into practice, and where paid subscriber content is finally organized so we can find what we want without scrolling through a year of posts to get to it.

This is finally here, and it’s here because of the community that’s been showing up to read, share, question, and build alongside me. Thank you for being part of this, for engaging with the work, and for the trust that made all of it possible.

See you in the stacks!