AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF AMERICAN FORESTRY. 119 
Cuapter XII. 
UNITED STATES FOREST SERVICE OFFICE M®=THODS. 
Some Norss. 
The office methods of the United States Forest Service are characteris- 
tically direct and logical. Essentially, there is an especial place designed for 
everything, and everything is made to fit automatically into that place. 
Typically, there is a detailed standardisation of procedure set forth in written 
departmental directions for the guidance of officers. 
A roomy tidiness, an absence of papers, and a surrounding presence of 
‘ oak cabinets, are the general impression of the observer. These results flow 
from the filing system adopted. 
The correspondence registration system of Australian public departments 
generally involves the numbering consecutively of every letter received, and 
the recording of a summary of its subject under its appropriate section in 
a tome-like correspondence register. 
A corollary of the scheme is another tome—the big index—which keeps 
trace of every letter in its meanderings throughout the service from the time 
it is first received until it is deposited finally in one of the piled-up bundles of 
papers in the dusty archives of the department. 
This process involves the detention of each letter for the best part of 
the day in the Record Room, and, while it is effective, it is unnecessarily 
tardy, cumbersome, and untidy. 
The vertical filing system adopted by the United States of America 
Forest Service obviates the keeping of a correspondence register and an index, 
and, in fact, the employment of a special records staff. 
There is nothing very new about the scheme, which is in general use in 
the commercial world. The diversity of the subject matter handled, and the 
intricacies of departmental routine, however, have militated against its 
employment by the public services. 
In view of that fact, it is of sufficient interest to describe here in some 
detail, the methods adopted by the United States of America Forest Service 
in applying the vertical filing system successfully to the needs of Government 
business on a large and complex scale. 
Vertical filing means filing papers on edge in the drawers of a specially 
designed cabinet. All related letters, the most recent one on top, are placed in 
folders, one of heavy manila paper, which serve also to keep them smooth, 
flat, and clean. The folders are separated and indexed by “ guides” of stiff 
material, which keep them upright in the drawer. The tops of these guides 
project, and bear the letter, name, or number of the classification. The 
indexing of the file is arranged on the basis either of the correspondents’ names, 
the location, or the subject. 
Thus the papers themselves are translated into pages, the “ guides ” 
become section headings, and the cabinet itself provides the cover. All com- 
bined form an automatic correspondence register in the applied science. of 
labour-saving, and the classification scheme replaces the index. 
The main difficulty in applying this system to the needs of the Australian 
forest services appears to have lain in the formulation of a classification system. 
The United States of America Forest Service has evolved a subjective 
classification arranged on a self-indexing basis. No card records whatever 
are employed. 
