It is true that they seldom have formal training in the intricacies of the cataloguer’s art: they are not necessarily up on the elaborate Anglo-American cataloguing rules, nor are they current concerning the periodic “Rrs, or Rule Interpretations, issued by the Library of Congress, which—like hermeneutical dispatches from the I.R.S. or the Financial Accounting Standards perplexing cases in classification as they emerge. Most operators have had no library-school courses in the Dewey Decimal system (still thriving, by the way, and very big in Europe), or the “Sears List of Subject Headings,” or Cutter numbers, or the abbreviational niceties of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (I.S.B.D.) format—but they do apparently pick up a great deal as they go.

As Marchand elucidates, it was most likely before his research trip to Rome in autumn 1928 that Warburg had all the material in the then-existent 72 boxes stamped with a number sequence identifying each individual item by its box and its place within the order of items across all boxes (so, for instance, the index card shown in Fig. 2. would be item number 10042 in the overall sequence). This detailed indexing allowed Warburg and Gertrud Bing to assemble a new set of Zettelkästen specifically for the Rome trip without worrying about irredeemably displacing any items from their original locations. These “travelling boxes” were never dismantled as planned, however, and are still part of the Archive today, recognisable by a separate numbering sequence marked in square brackets (e.g. ZK [1]). Although the square-bracketed Zettelkasten sequence now also includes other boxes that were unnumbered at Warburg’s death, the visible difference between the two sequences remains a testimony to the mobility of the Zettelkasten corpus and its role in Warburg’s work on the famous Bilderatlas, a central part of which occurred during the abovementioned Rome trip with Bing.

THE SCIENCE OF THE FILING ENGINEERThe Simplex Alpabetic Method Is Considered the Most Efficient and Takes Care ofTAverage Requirements - It May Be the 95% File-Complex Methods Also Explained

Stated briefly the work of the intelligence department can be 50brought under the three heads: filing, indexing and summarising.

In each class the individual articles or the folders containing anumber of articles belonging to the same firm are numbered con-secutively, CI, C2, Tl, T2 etc. that is : a new series of consecutivenumbers is started with each initial letter. The correspondenceof Smith & Co. may for instance be in a folder marked C34, thecatalogues of Jones Bros, may be numbered T89. But theremay be a hundred letters to and from Smith & Co. and a dozencatalogues from Jones Bros, so that it will be necessary to dividefurther until each specific article will have a specific numberby which it can be quoted exclusively reserved to it. This isdone by suffixing the date to the previous numbers thus : C34-3VII7or T89-1906 etc. The former refers to a letter of Smith & Co.dated July the third 1907, the latter refers to a catalogue ofJones Bros, of 1906. No matter how large the files will becomein time, the meaning of these numbers will remain the same, andthere can be no other articles bearing these numbers. If a numberor numbers refer to more than one article, confusion is invariablythe result

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

Point 3 is almost certainly the one that still bugs Doug. All sorts of mechanisms and utilities are around and used (source code control, registries, WWW search engines, and on and on), but the problem of indexing and finding relevant information is tougher today than ever before, even on one's own hard disk, let alone the WWW.

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.