The filing clerk
James Melzer on the members only aifia mailing list (a good reason to sign up):
"In the hayday of bureaucracy, in the period during and immediately after World War II, central filing of all documents and communications was standard practice at most US government offices and businesses. "The filing room" handled filing and retrieval for everyone in the organization.
Every document and communication was produced in triplicate - one for the central filing system, one for the recipient, and one for the sender's own filing system. This dual filing system - things on a person's desk vs. things in a central file - provided both a personalized structure and a central structure that could be managed independently. Librarians called Clerks handled both categorization and retrieval from the central file. This was a crucial element of this system's success.
During World War II, the city of Washington was basically one huge filing system in support of a handful of decision-makers. Efficient? Not really. Effective? You bet. The Depression made labor dirt cheap, so filing staff were a dime a dozen.
And then the personal computer and downsizing came along, and all that went into the toilet. People could create, file and retrieve documents from their desk - why would you need the overhead of a central filing room? Records managers literally resorted to waiting for people to retire and raiding their desks for files. The IT Dept became the new file room, but IT services were radically different clerk services. IT provides infrastructure; not filing; not retrieval.
And now an entire industry has grown around the need to build effective intranets to essentially re-create the functionality of the central filing room. Corporate librarians are being retasked to help out. Consultants are being brought in. IT is getting involved. Was money really saved by eliminating the file room? Can anybody find anything?"
Harrold Pollins: "I was in the Orderly Room, and my particular task was to be the filing clerk. There was little to do as only a handful of correspondence came into HQ and a similar small amount was sent out. It didn’t take long to accomplish my daily task. I had a few files, marked KVC (for K Lines Victory Camp) 1 or 2 or 3. Memory suggests that sometimes I got confused and some items were marked by me KCV. But no-one ever looked at them so it didn’t matter."