As a result, hisindex is simultaneously a relic of research and a reminder of the pitfalls of all such effortsto create systematic knowledge, regardless of the underlying technology – paper, digitalor otherwise.

Beyond the realm of historians, advocates called card indexes ‘the only portable,elastic, simple, orderly and self-indexing way of keeping records’, and the practice wascommon enough that Gustave Flaubert parodied the unending and ultimately futilepursuit of all knowledge in his 1881 satire Bouvard et Pe ́cuchet (Dickinson, 1894).