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A very common way of filing (certainly the way I used to manage archive
material I wanted to keep) is to create lots of folders or boxes with category
labels on them.
This system works OK for those bits of filing - bank statements or utility
bills, for instance - which are cohesive enough to be sensibly fileable by
category, but I find that any other random bits of paper are just too
multi-purpose to be pigeon holed in one box, and an approach based on permuted indexing gets around that quite effectively.
My filing system fits together as follows:
indexed folders - each piece to be filed gets a unique ID based
on the next free slot in a folder.
index file - each piece gets a single-line entry in the index
file. Each entry follows the format:
<ID> <title and description>
For example:
A0050.1 Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB)
A0053.1 If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke)
This demonstrates both my usual approach of putting keywords not present in
the title in brackets afterwards, and my use of a
<folder>.<item> notation in generating item IDs.
generated index - every now and then, I run pindex
to generate the permuted index for the index file. A permuted index is
where all the words in all the lines are ordered alphabetically, with an
indication of where they came from. The ptx program mentioned
above has its own method of presentation, but the permuted index generated
for the above example entries is as follows:
Airlines : If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke) > A0053.1
API : Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB) > A0050.1
EJB : Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB) > A0050.1
Enterprise : Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB) > A0050.1
If : If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke) > A0053.1
Java : Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB) > A0050.1
JavaBeans : Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB) > A0050.1
joke : If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke) > A0053.1
Operating : If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke) > A0053.1
specification : Enterprise JavaBeans API specification (Java, EJB) > A0050.1
Systems : If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke) > A0053.1
Were : If Operating Systems Were Airlines (joke) > A0053.1
Each line is in the form:
<keyword> : <title and description> >
<ID>
This can be printed out for reference next to the folder storage.
finding a reference - assuming that you are looking for a
keyword, use the permuted index by looking up the keyword you are
interested in. This will give you all those items whose index entries
contain that keyword.
In the example above, I'm interested in all occurrences of the word
"API". Looking this word up in the left-hand column I see that only the EJB
spec refers to an API.
Note that the raw index file is itself often sufficient if you can use
grep or some other search tool to look for words you're interested
in.
What I do with a new piece of filing is:
write a unique ID onto the piece to be filed. The ID comes from the next
free slot in the filing cabinet.
add a suitable entry to the index file.
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