Cards in drawers
Or Information Architecture before the digital age
The need for organizing, sorting and finding relevant information was here long before the technology took over and made information architecture into one of its digital components.
When debating about ways people approached information architecture in the past, I have immediately thought about library filing cabinets. I have been always fascinated by them, by their repetition, dimensions, the visual neatness and geometrical precision of little drawers filled with cards, each compartment hiding a huge amount of information.
This fascination deepened after watching the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” when I was a teenager and seeing the huge filing system of the New York City library.
It was a relic of a world that wasn’t mine anymore when I started going to the library myself (I was born in 1991), but I would sometimes borrow a book that still had an index card inside, sometimes even handwritten. This would intrigue me as a reminder of a perished world that used to be somehow more tangible.
The card filing library system was developed by a man called Melvil Dewey in 1876. Dewey came up with a unified system of library classification known as the Dewey decimal system, a set of rules aimed at organizing books according to their main topic.
Furthermore, Dewey established physical measurements for filing drawers and designed library index cards which became industry standard.
He was also concerned about usability of these cards and about user-centered design in general, as the following UX advice from 1898 proves:
“Legibility is the main consideration. Skillful writers acquire reasonable speed without sacrificing legibility. The time of the writer is, however, of small importance compared with that of the reader.”
The biggest innovation Dewey came up with was the concept of “relative location” — allowing to add new books according to their subject, grouping them with books with the same topic. Within the category, books were then sorted alphabetically by surname of their authors.
Even though this topic-focused approach might seem obvious, in the 19th century this was a real change. Till then, most libraries were filing books as they were acquiring them, giving each a number chronologically and adding them one after the other on the shelf. After Dewey’s revolution, each book was given a code based on its relation to other books on the same topic and location within the designated shelf space.
This allowed libraries to let readers browse themselves by topics, rather than applying for a title and waiting for a librarian to find it “in the back”. The Dewey decimal system was a user experience design par excellence.
The filing cabinets were organized according to the main categories, subcategories and classes. These guidelines were printed in the proximity of the cabinets so that readers could find the “area code” of their desired topic. There were also letter dividers since each topic and subtopic were organized alphabetically.
Despite the filing cabinets and index cards being long gone, libraries still use this classification method, only with the use of less tangible digital “drawers”. Nonetheless, the information architecture of the Dewey decimal system lasted the test of time as it still (in its multiple variations and updated editions) serves as the most common library system today.
Sources:
The Card Catalog Is Officially Dead
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/card-catalog-dead-180956823/
Melvil Dewey — Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvil_Dewey
Dewey Decimal Classification- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
Library catalogue — Wikipedia
