Scientific principles had bled so thoroughly into both culture and business that even advertising for filing systems in business in the 1930 featured their ability to be used and expanded scientifically.

For Kaiser, his "intelligence department" has three broad functions: summarizing, indexing, and filing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070121034201/http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/filing.001.html

https://communicationnation.blogspot.com/2005/12/noguchi-filing-system.html

https://www.filing.com/

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015071458213&seq=1

Modern Filing Systems<br /> Wagemaker Furniture Company, Ltd. 1904 furniture catalog

Wigent, William David, Burton David William Housel, and Edward Harry Gilman. Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1916. http://archive.org/details/modernfilingate02compgoog.

Original .pdf converted with docdrop.org for OCR annotation on 2023-03-24.

annotation target: urn:x-pdf:3c1f14d64c91cf4b513efa16df4ed90d

Annotations: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=url%3Aurn%3Ax-pdf%3A3c1f14d64c91cf4b513efa16df4ed90d

Wigent, William David, Burton David William Housel, and Edward Harry Gilman. Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System. Rochester, N.Y.: Yawman & Erbe Mfg. Co., 1916. http://archive.org/details/modernfilingate02compgoog.

This is almost pitched as a product with the brand name "The Notecard System".

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708133632/http://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-poic-system/

Brief explanation of the Pile of Index Cards system, but without significant depth.

As is apparently often in describing new organizing systems (commonplace books, zettelkasten, PoIC, etc.), not everyone is going to understand it the first time, or even understand what is going on or why one would want to use it.

This post by Susan is such an example.

Susan does almost immediately grasp that this might be something one could transfer into a digital system however, particularly for the search functionality.

all this, AND...

some comes down to the explanations given and the reasons. In this case, they're scant and the original is in middling English and large chunks of Japanese without any of the "why".

The Noguhchi Filing System is a method developed by Noguchi Yukio, a Japanese economist, that organizes one's projects using envelopes and sorts them based on the frequency upon which you work on them.

Lesser known by whose estimation? Certainly lesser known in America in 2014 (and even now in 2022), but how popular was/is it in Japan or other locations?

A benefit of 4 x 6" cards is that clippings and other items can often be more easily filed along with them as opposed to the smaller 3 x 5" cards.

I was doing some random searches for older material on zettelkasten in German and came across this.

Apparently I've come across this before in a similar context: https://hypothes.is/a/CsgyjAXQEeyMfoN7zLcs0w

The description now makes me want to read it all the more!

This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.

Given the portions about knowledge and control, it might also be of interest to @remikalir wrt his coming book.

http://www.officemuseum.com/filing_equipment.htm

Now that we're digitizing the Zettelkasten we often find dated notes that say things like "note 60,7B3 is missing". This note replaces the original note at this position. We often find that the original note is maybe only 20, 30 notes away, put back in the wrong position. But Luhmann did not start looking, because where should he look? How far would he have to go to maybe find it again? So, instead he adds the "note is missing"-note. Should he bump into the original note by chance, then he could put it back in its original position. Or else, not.

Niklas Luhmann had a simple way of dealing with lost cards by creating empty replacements which could be swapped out if found later. It's not too dissimilar to doing inventory in a book store where mischievous customers pick up books, move them, or even hide them sections away. Going through occasionally or even regularly or systematically would eventually find lost/misfiled cards unless they were removed entirely from the system (similar to stolen books).