Locating supplementary resources; Technical and mechanical processes; Pamphlets and clippings; Clippings; Vocational material; Local history; Maps; Pictorial materials; Special files and folders.

Pamphlets and clippings are compact, retrievable, current, unique and authoritative. They enable librarians with limited budgets to cover many otherwise financially prohibitive subjects. With these features, vertical files are becoming increasingly attractive to school, public and academic librarians. This book is designed for library staff members working on their library's vertical file, or those wanting to set one up.

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.

A perennial favorite. ...invaluable as a learning tool. I highly recommend it. --PREVIEW

A step-by-step guide to working with vertical files and its alternatives based on Shirley Miller's Vertical Files and its Satellites, second edition (Libraries Unlimited, 1979), this volume introduces new resources, new products and new techniques, and serves as a guide to specific kinds of supplementary materials. The general approach and the coverage of topics has been changed, placing the emphasis on alternatives.