I’m just curious if there are many business firms that still have large, paper-based filing departments. It seems like most large companies have their records mostly in electronic form, now, and the remainder is distributed throughout various departments, and individual offices and work areas. But the classic image of a filing department is a vast room with rows of cabinets, staffed by people who do nothing but handle the files all day. Do any like that still exist?
I don’t know about private companies, but I can tell you that most state and county criminal justice systems still use paper. I have a friend that works as a file clerk for the Florida Department of Corrections. His job is to file stuff in the inmate records all day.
There’s a massive filling department in the hospital that my research group is attached to.
As an interesting (well, depending on your point of view) aside - at this particular hospital, red means dead.
That is, when a patient dies, their records are transfered to a red file.
I used to work at a very large and very old insurance company (100+ years old) and I can assure you they had a huge filing department. In fact they had a special facility that was pretty much exclusively dedicated to records storage. I don’t know how things have changed in the 5 years since I left the business but many financial products require document retention for something like 13 years after the contract is closed. For a variable annuity purchased at age 30 or so the product could have a life of 60 years (say you died at 90), add to that the 13 years mentioned above times a couple of million policyholders and you have yourself one big mountain of paper.
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Yes they do. The previous company I worked for had a huge filing department. In fact, the whole second floor of the bulding I worked in was nothing but rows of files and it was heavily secured too. Files were electronically signed out to you by the clerks that worked there.
Thanks, all. I just wondered because I once had a summer job filing at a small law firm, and then I’ve read one or two novels set in the early 1900’s were somebody gets a job as a file clerk. I’m strangely fascinated by that whole huge-office aura because it usually seems so dismal as protrayed in fiction. Cf. also such films as The Apartment and The Crowd.
I work for a large company myself, and am thankful that things here aren’t very dismal (but then I don’t work the files). AFAIK we don’t have anything like a separate records department.
While a modern file clerk will certainly need some computer skills, many businesses are required by regulations to maintain paper records, or the burden of electronic records is too great. In the drug industry, for example, converting to electronic documents requires proof of document integrity, security, etc., to such a degree that many are unwilling to do it. Consequently, document control departments at such companies can get very big.
A few years ago I had a temp job with the Personnel Dept. for the State. I was a file clerk. Every two weeks, the paper payroll sheets came to us for all of the employees in state government, got entered into the computer, and then I had to organize them, alphabetically within departments, box 'em up, and then send them down to Public Records for archive.
I also had to file every w-4, direct deposit and insurance form in each employees folder.
I hated that job. I was so glad when my 6 month contract was up. $10 an hour is not enough to make me do that for 8 hours a day, ever again.
Banks. Banks have huge paper files. I was working for IBM for a while running network cable for their new network based mortgage system. Before you could enter the “cold room” where the mainframes and servers were kept you had to go through the “Vault”.
The “Vault” consisted of massive file cabinets 10 ft high, 40ft long and on a electric motor system. They moved in an accordian like fashion. There would be 10 sets of these cabinets to a set of tracks. They could all move as one or independently. This is where they kept all of their contracts and deeds. It was incredible.