SIGIA-L Mail Archives: SIGIA-L: Melvil in the New Yorker
SIGIA-L: Melvil in the New Yorker
From: Joe Sokohl (joe_at_sokohl.com)
Date: Sat Mar 23 2002 - 08:47:19 EST
In the latest New Yorker magazine, there's a review of "The Myth of the
Paperless Office" by
Paper was important not to facilitate creative collaboration and thought
but as an instrument of control.
Perhaps no one embodied this notion more than the turn-of-the-century
reformer Melvil Dewey. Dewey has largely been forgotten by history,
perhaps because he was such a nasty fellow—an outspoken racist and
anti-Semite—but in his day he dominated America's thinking about the
workplace. He invented the Dewey decimal system, which revolutionized
the organization of libraries. He was an ardent advocate of shorthand
and of the metric system, and was so obsessed with time-saving and
simplification that he changed his first name from Melville to the more
logical Melvil. (He also pushed for the adoption of "catalog" in place
of "catalogue," and of "thruway" to describe major highways, a usage
that survives to this day in New York State). Dewey's principal business
was something called the Library Bureau, which was essentially the
Office Depot of his day, selling card catalogues, cabinets, office
chairs and tables, pre-printed business forms, and, most important,
filing cabinets. Previously, businessmen had stored their documents in
cumbersome cases, or folded and labelled the pieces of paper and stuck
them in the pigeonholes of the secretary desks so common in the
Victorian era. What Dewey proposed was essentially an enlarged version
of a card catalogue, where paper documents hung vertically in long
drawers.
The vertical file was a stunning accomplishment. In those
efficiency-obsessed days, it prompted books and articles and debates and
ended up winning a gold medal at the 1893 World's Fair, because it so
neatly addressed the threat of disorder posed by the proliferation of
paper. What good was that railroad schedule, after all, if it was lost
on someone's desk? Now a railroad could buy one of Dewey's vertical
filing cabinets, and put the schedule under "S," where everyone could
find it.
Interesting to think of the vertical file as a major information science
advancement--I never have, but it's interesting t
Joe Sokohl
Sokohl & Associates
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Helping you create digital solutions for real people
Technical writing, information architecture, and usability consulting
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www.sokohl.com
+1-804-873-6964
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