The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson © 2021 (https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83358)
Cover of Craig Robinson’s “The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information”
It is a history of information management at the turn of and in the early twentieth century from the perspective of the introduction of the vertical filing cabinet.
I know, I know, really exciting stuff! But to both an info management and history of objects geek, like myself, it has a certain appeal. Further, it approaches the subject not just from a “nuts and bolts” (pun intended) point-of-view, but from a sociological one and gender roles in the work environment.
The author notes: “The shift in focus from filing systems to filing cabinets means the book you are about to read is a history of storage, not a history of classification. To focus on storage is to bring the filing cabinet to the foreground, to see how the cabinet as an object shapes people’s interaction with information rather than explore the effects of systems of classification on knowledge. This is a history about the tabs that make classification and indexing systems visible, not a history that uses the filing cabinet to explore the consequences of organizing papers by author name or subject. Classification and indexing (and the blurring of those in the early twentieth century) do appear in this history, but as ways to rethink storage and to understand the filing cabinet’s role in the development of a modern conception of information.”
A couple of key concepts/quotes that I found interesting:
Chapter 1: Verticality (A Skyscraper for the Office): On page 50, Robertson paraphrases Carl C. Parson from his 1921 work, Office Organization and Management: “ The move from an “old-style storehouse model” to a modern flat-top desk foregrounded a change in the mode of storage—from personal to collective—as papers would ideally be moved from desks into filing cabinets.” I wonder what this has to say in our digital age about how we store and share our digital documents? Have we moved back from the collective to the personal? Food for thought as we further embrace the use of Teams, OneDrive, etc.
Chapter 4: Granular Certainty (Applying System to the Office): On page 132 Robertson says: ‘Within an economic context, the term granular signifies the belief that breaking things down into small parts to produce a high degree of detail or specificity will result in efficiency. Certainty indicates the conviction that greater specificity will reduce individual discretion and increase the likelihood that a task will be completed efficient.” It is my hope that the work we have been doing with the DP&A and workflow visualization will bring more granular certainty to what we do within the University Libraries.
Although, dry at times, it is well interspersed with reproductions of equipment catalog and marketing material images, and is generally engaging. I give it 3 of 5 stars and a recommended reading.