What Is The Size Of A Standard Index Card

An index carte in a library menu catalog. This type of cataloging has mostly been supplanted by computerization.

A hand-written American index card.

An index card (or record card in British English and system cards in Australian English) consists of card stock (heavy paper) cutting to a standard size, used for recording and storing small-scale amounts of discrete data. A collection of such cards either serves as, or aids the creation of, an alphabetize for expedited lookup of information (such as a library catalog or a back-of-the-book index). This organisation was invented by Carl Linnaeus,^[1] around 1760.^[2] ^[iii]

Format [edit]

The nearly mutual size for alphabetize card in North America and the UK is 3 by 5 inches (76.2 by 127.0 mm), hence the common proper name 3-by-five bill of fare. Other sizes widely available include 4 past 6 inches (101.6 past 152.4 mm), 5 by 8 inches (127.0 by 203.2 mm) and ISO-size A7 (74 by 105 mm or 2.nine by 4.1 in). Cards are bachelor in blank, ruled and grid styles in a variety of colors. Special divider cards with protruding tabs and a variety of cases and trays to agree the cards are also sold past stationers and part production companies. They are part of standard jotter and office supplies all around the globe.

Uses [edit]

Index cards are used for a wide range of applications and environments: in the home to record and store recipes, shopping lists, contact information and other organizational data; in business to record presentation notes, projection research and notes, and contact information; in schools equally flash cards or other visual aids; and in academic enquiry to concur data such as bibliographical citations or notes (run across Zettelkasten). Professional person volume indexers used alphabetize cards in the creation of book indexes until they were replaced past indexing software in the 1980s and 1990s.

An often suggested organization method for bibliographical use is to use the smaller 3-inch by 5-inch cards to record the title and commendation information of works cited, while using larger cards for recording quotes or other data. Index cards are used for many events and are helpful for planning.

History [edit]

Carl Linnaeus invented the index menu in lodge to assistance deal with the information overload facing early scientists that occurred from overseas discoveries. Linnaeus had to deal with a conflict betwixt needing to bring information into a fixed social club for purposes of later retrieval, and needing to integrate new data into that social club permanently. His solution was to keep information on particular subjects on split sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled. In the mid 1760s Linnaeus refined this into what we phone call index cards. Index cards could exist selected and moved around at will to update and compare information at any time.^[iv]

Until the digitization of library catalogs, which began in the 1980s, the primary tool used to locate books was the card catalog, in which every book was described on three cards, filed alphabetically under its title, author, and subject field (if not-fiction). Similar catalogs were used past law firms and other entities to organize large quantities of stored documents. However, the adoption of standard cataloging protocols throughout nations with international agreements, along with the rise of the Internet and the conversion of cataloging systems to digital storage and retrieval, has made obsolescent the widespread use of alphabetize cards for cataloging.

The commencement early on modern card index was designed by Thomas Harrison (ca 1640s). Harrison's manuscript on The Ark of Studies^[five] (Arca studiorum) was edited and improved by Vincent Placcius in his well-known handbook on excerpting methods (De arte excerpendi, 1689). Using cards to create an index was the abstraction of 18th-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who is known equally "the male parent of modern taxonomy" for his work on categorizing species. For organizing data, he needed a system for that was expandable and able to be rearranged easily; so he kept each datum on an individual sheet, and could add new sheets and reorganize simply.

Card catalogs equally currently known arose in the 19th century, and Melvil Dewey standardized the alphabetize cards used in library carte du jour catalogs in the 1870s.

In the late 1890s, edge-notched cards were invented, which allowed for easy sorting of data past means of a needle-similar tool. These edge-notched cards were phased out in the 1980s in favor of calculator databases, and they are no longer sold.

Kardex index bill of fare filing system

James Rand, Sr.'s Rand Ledger Company (founded 1898) with its Visible Ledger organisation, and his son James Rand, Jr.'s American Kardex dominated sales of index card filing systems worldwide through much of the 20th century. "Kardex" became a common substantive, especially in the medical records field where "filing a kardex" came to mean filling out a patient tape on an index carte du jour.^[6]

Vladimir Nabokov wrote his works on index cards, a exercise mentioned in his work Pale Fire.^[seven]

See likewise [edit]

Accost book
Edge-notched card
Hipster PDA
Paper sizes
Punched carte
Rolodex

Literature [edit]

Alberto Cevolini (Ed.): Forgetting Machines. Knowledge Management Development in Early on Modern Europe. Brill, Leiden/Boston 2016
Thomas Harrison: The Ark of Studies. Ed. by Alberto Cevolini. Brepols, Turnhout 2017
Markus Krajewski: Paper Machines. About cards & catalogs, 1548-1929. MIT Printing, Cambridge 2011, ISBN 978-0-262-01589-ix

References [edit]

^ Carl Linnaeus Invented The Alphabetize Carte du jour ScienceDaily, June xvi, 2009
^ Staffan Müller-Wille, Sara Scharf Indexing Nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and his Fact-Gathering Strategies University of Exeter & Academy of Toronto, 2009, p. 4 Archived 2010-12-25 at the Wayback Auto
^ Everts, Sarah (2016). "Data Overload". Distillations. two (ii): 26–33. Retrieved 20 March 2018.
^ "Carl Linnaeus Invented The Index Bill of fare". ScienceDaily . Retrieved 2020-07-31 .
^ Thomas Harrison, The Ark of Studies. Ed. past Alberto Cevolini. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017
^ "Kardex". Encyclopedia.com – A Dictionary of Nursing. HighBeam Enquiry. 2008. Retrieved September 11, 2014.
^ Golden, Herbert (1967). "Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40". The Paris Review. Summer-Autumn 1967 (41). Retrieved 7 April 2013.