Last month's article discussed the proper storage of your growing slide collection addressing both the concerns of safely archiving your slides as well as ease of viewing. This month's article will review the importance of a filing system that allows quick and easy access to your slides. This ensures that no matter how large your collection becomes that you can quickly access slides of a given subject and keep track of slides that are temporarily out of your collection. The latter may be slides on loan to nature clubs or parks, slides that are submitted to magazines or books, or simply at the photo store for printing.
There is probably no such thing as the perfect filing system. The system that works for you may not work for someone else. Once your collection grows, it is often difficult to remember every slide you have. For this reason it is useful if each slide has a unique place in your system and therefore its presence or absence is easily noted. This may mean that each slide has a unique number which is recorded when the slide leaves it's holder, or a specific location in a slide sheet. For example, you could have all your bluebird photographs on individual numbered sheets and each slot is given a number. Since each standard sheet holds 20 slides, you could label a slide as 1-14 for sheet number one, slot number 14. This way a quick glance at the sheets will tell you if a slide is absent. This is also handy for jotting down on a sheet of paper when the slide leaves your collection.
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Here a slide sheet of Atlantic Puffins is displayed to demonstrate the filing system presented here. Each slide has a unique place according to page and slot number. This makes it easy to tell when a slide is missing as well as simplifying re-filing. |
Ideally your system will allow filing by subject rather than by year, trip or roll of film. This allows an easy comparison of slides of a given subject quickly. For example, if you have accumulated 20 photos over the last 10 years of Scarlet Tanagers you will want one slide sheet (or photo box) to contain all of those photos - as opposed to looking in 20 separate sources if you chose to file by roll of film!
The following is an example of how one of the authors files his slides- this is not meant to be the definitive method, but one way that works well.
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Here is an example of Color-coding the Order, Family, and Species name. |
In this system slides are grouped first by major categories, i.e. Bird photos, Reptile, Amphibian, Butterfly, and so on. Within the bird photo section exist multiple subcategories: Order and Family, followed by species. The slides are stored in hanging file folders by subject with color-coded plastic tabs used to index each of the above categories. For example if a photo of a Scarlet Tanager were desired then the following location would be checked:
| Bird Photo Section: | |
| Passeriformes | (Order) |
| Tanager Family | (Family name) |
| Scarlet Tanager | (Species name) |
The Order and Family name of any given species is readily attainable from any current field guide. One can organize the "order" of the Order and Family names exactly as outlined in the field guide or simply do this alphabetically. Within a given Family grouping the author has also chosen to organize the species alphabetically for ease of retrieval (and searching) but nothing would prevent you from following the field guides sequence directly. If you chose to sequence according to your guide, be aware that an "Eastern guide" will order a given bird different than a "Western guide", so it may be wiser to stick to alphabetical order.
While it may seem a bit cumbersome and formal to file according to the proper Order and Family, it does make the whole system less ambiguous. Alternatively, you could sequence things simply as Birds, and then alphabetize from there.
With some planning, you can save yourself a lot of headaches later as your collection grows. Changing your filing methology is very time consuming and confusing so planning wisely now will save you later. Next month's article will discuss methods of labeling slides.
