Read Principles of Indexing and Filing by Laura H. Cadwallader and S. Ada Rice (The H. M. Rowe Company)

An early 21st century textbook on filing and indexing practices geared toward office workers. First edition, 1932.

The first section is on the rules of alphabetization and indexing to standardize the space of ordering cards for both people’s names and company names.

The second section covers some history on basic filing techniques and then goes into alphabetic, geographic, numeric, and subject indexing methods. The final sections cover the L.B Automatic (Library Bureau), the triple check method, and various other special filing methods as well as maintaining and transferring files for long term storage. Illustrations of these various methods help to visualize how they worked in practice.

This text isn’t as interesting or as comprehensive as the works of J. Kaiser from earlier in the century.

Read on 2025-11-16.