26 tags for alphabet
Robert Ford reported in personal communication that how he use index cards and tag. He use additional 26 tags (13 blocks x 2 separation) from right side to indicate a contents. It will be an good example of the Extension for the PoIC.
The way I organise my cards is by date like you, plus I use the 13 blocks on the top right hand side in half-block increments to denote the 26 letters of the alphabet.
I use the same mark as i use for record, discovery, next action, and reference to show whether the name (keyword/title) for the card is A, B, C, etc. That way I can search the cards looking for someone’s phone number (eg Mark is under M) or a note about snow would be under S, etc. I don’t know what phonetics are used in japanese and whether they could be sorted along similar lines.
When the cards are viewed in a pack from above you can’t instinctively jump to a single letter, but in a second you can work out what what mark equates to the letter you are looking for, and soon after you can find those cards with that letter, even easier if you have a rough idea of the period in which it was written.
All the best
Robert
February 16th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
this sounds like a potentially very useful implementation of alphabetical searching in a paper system. the only challenge here is only using a single tag/letter and also choosing a consistent and simple tagging system. taking advantage of the ’spines’ or sides of index cards like this is really clever and very powerful.
thanks a lot for posting this!