The Filing Association of New York

Via Don, news of the annual meeting of the Filing Association of New York. The after-dinner at Gonfaroni's – closed for 96 years, sadly – sounds like a hoot.

A newspaper clipping. The text reads: OFFICE APPLIANCES — July, 1922. The Filing Association of New York. The annual meeting of the Filing Association of New York was held at the Washington Irving High School, the President, Mrs. E. K. McDowell, presiding. The following officers were elected to serve for the coming year: President, Ethel G. Armstrong; vice-president, Annabel Oatis; second vice-president, Katherine Clemens; treasurer, Emma D. Bendelari; recording secretary, Louise Keese; corresponding secretary, Florence Huisking. Executive board: Cora Corbin, Helen Sprague, Estelle W. Merrill, Elizabeth King McDowall, Myrta L. Mason (appointed last year—one more year to serve). The executive board has accepted with regret the resignation of Mrs. E. K. McDowall, who finds the pressure of business too heavy to continue on the board. Miss Julia Behringer has been appointed to serve in Mrs. McDowall's place. Article IV of the Constitution was amended to read: 'Dues. Annual dues of the Association shall be $2.00, payable upon notice of election. The fiscal year shall begin June first.' The annual convention of the N. Y. State Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs will be held on Saturday, May 27, at the Hotel Pennsylvania. The convention will end with a dinner in the evening. It is expected that the Filing Association will be represented by several members. The last meeting of the Filing Association for this season was a dinner at Gonfaroni's, McDougall and Eighth streets, New York, on Monday, June 12, at six o'clock. The chairman of the entertainment committee, Mrs. Winifred Wilbur, has gone to great pains to make this affair a success. The speaker of the evening, Mrs. E. W. Sears, president of the New York League for Business and Professional Women, had just returned from a trip throughout the United States and will have many interesting things to tell. There will be no more meetings of the association until the Fall, but this does not mean that all activities will cease. The Executive Board will continue to meet and the various committees will be at work getting ready to start up with renewed vigor after the Summer vacation.

Of course this is charming and quaint, but it makes obvious something that I think about all the time: the fact that, in the past, people used to actively work on the problem of filing. It was a profession; there was a local Association that met regularly.

These filing associations turned into organisations like ARMA, the Association of Records Managers and Administrators. So it's not like we totally forgot how to file stuff. But – at least in my professional experience – it's not something the normal office worker is ever exposed to.

And when filing is something you're forced to do, it tends to be in service of checking a compliance box. Those of us who've had the pleasure of using an enterprise 'document management system' – looking at you, HP TRIM – know that they rarely make a thing easier to find. They just make your mistakes harder to correct.1

Yet it remains the situation that the average office worker is the one creating volumes of stuff; this worker being given little to no training in the still-essential field of filing. No wonder our systems are such a mess.

No wonder nobody can find anything any more.

Footnotes

  1. Every single such system hosting a folder named z_deleted. ↩