it follows that no purchasable articlecan supply our individual wants so far as a key to our stockof information is concerned. We shall always be mainly de-pendent in this direction upon our own efforts to meet ourown situation.

That is not the case.It is true, a variety of published indexes, catalogues and biblio-graphies to periodical and other literature exists, but they donot and cannot meet our individual case, for1 Every individual moves in a sphere of his own and coversindividual ground such as a printed index cannot touch.2 Printed indexes although they give usable information,cannot go sufficiently into details, they must studyabove all the common requirements of a number ofsubscribers sufficiently large to assure their existenceand continuance (apart from the question of adver-tising).

the supervisormust therefore be prepared to carry the system a step furtherwhenever occasion arises. There is therefore an opportunity tobring individuality into play. If we are not prepared to assert ourindividuality within and without the limits set by the system, wemay depend upon it that our collaborators or subordinates willassert theirs, consciously or unconsciously, and we shall find inthe end that our system has been distorted in all directions, withoutnecessarily transgressing our rules, although the latter will be buta matter of time.

ned the art of notetaking for themselves that this pamphletis prepared. It does not seem wise to attempt to lay down any verystringent rules on the subject. We can only suggest the more generalmethods from which every man can work out his own particular system.

Instead of imposing a ‘rational’ order on the fragments,Barthes used the ‘stupid’, arbitrary, obvious order of the alphabet(which he also most often followed when he was classifying his indexcards): this was how he proceeded in ‘Variations on Writing’ and inRoland Barthes par Roland Barthes. This was how he achieved anindividual identity, surrendering to his tastes and to concrete littleidiosyncrasies.

Deutsch’s index, then, did not constitute the systematic and overarching view ofJewish history and contemporaneous Jewish issues that Deutsch had initially hoped tocreate. Instead, it was much more personal. It reflected his singular reading regime, and itworked with a certain shorthand: In later years Deutsch often just cited ‘Yiddish papers’or ‘Daily papers’, and in some instances he referred to ‘private information’. The cards,topics, and sources provide a sense of the specific information that interested Deutsch.

Examining the cards, it becomes clear that the index constitutes not a mythic totalhistory but a specific set of facts and data that piqued Deutsch’s interest and whichreflected his personal research priorities (see Figure 2).

It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.