ABSTRACT
Some 2700 years after writing came to Greece, major advances in its storage and retrieval continue to occur. I am not talking about anything major like the invention of print or the computer, but merely a lowly container. The vertical filing cabinet had an incredible ripple effect. Just having several drawers stacked one on top of the other was no advance over stuffing things in boxes, although it did provide direct and immediate access to each drawer. The real innovation came with the reorganization of knowledge, which, in turn, entailed major changes in a number of existing tools. The vertical file permitted a hierarchical system of organization that was immediately evident to the user via the labels on drawers, on groups of folders, and on the folders themselves in addition to the original piece of paper. Even those pieces of paper became standardized in two sizes, ‘regular’ and legal, in order to fit neatly within the folders. Despite the efficiency and, indeed, elegance of the system, we still can’t find things, because the vertical file was too successful. It enabled us to retrieve far more papers than before and, as always seems to be the case, thereby created far more papers for us to store, with the result that another major invention was needed. The computer enables us to retrieve even more information in far less space even more easily, but the increase in the amount of information now available is simply staggering. What is perhaps most interesting here is that each tool or technology makes it possible to deal more efficiently with the current accumulation of words, but by virtue of its success propagates yet more words that need yet more techniques to control them.
