Main entry:

Robertson, Craig, 1969- author.

Title & Author:

The filing cabinet : a vertical history of information / Craig Robertson.

Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2021]
©2021

Description:

xiii, 313 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction: the efficient work of paperwork -- Part I. The cabinet -- Verticality: a skyscraper for the office -- Integrity: paper's steel enclosure -- Cabinet logic: efficiency through partitions -- Part II. Filing -- Granular certainty: applying system to the office -- Automatic filing: memory for the machine -- The ideal file clerk: controlling gender in the office -- Domestic storage: cabinet logic in the home -- Afterword: out of time, out of place.

Summary:

"Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. The filing cabinet emerges here as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today's digital world"-- Provided by publisher.
"The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information. The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used. Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information. Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world. "-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

1517909465 (paperback)
9781517909468 (paperback)
1517909457 (hardcover)
9781517909451 (hardcover)

Subject:

Filing cabinets.
Sex role in the work environment United States History.
Sexual division of labor United States History.
Classeurs.
Rôle selon le sexe en milieu de travail États-Unis Histoire.
filing cabinets.
Sex role in the work environment.
Sexual division of labor.
United States.

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 309871
Call No.: BIB 255014
Status: Available