Philosophy on Organization? My officemate claims the best solution to the office organizational problem would be to rectify the gender imbalance of the office. An office full of men will look like a man's office.
I personally don't have a problem with the organization. It's actually a person- and task- oriented stack system. So if I need something, I go to the desk where I was working on it last, and dig to the layer that corresponds to the last time I used it.
Last spring, however, we hit a "tipping point", where it was easier to print out new copies than go search for the old ones. That's when you clean the office.
Microfilm (and Fiche) reader: A lot of our material (images of medieval manuscripts) is conserved on microfilm. 50 years ago, this was the only solution. Today, we can buy digital photos, but libraries are conservative when it comes to these things, and many still don't offer this option. For those that do, they often still have a microfilm of the text, and it's far cheaper to make a copy of the microfilm than pay a professional photographer to shoot an entire book. Furthermore, microfilms can last hundreds of years in storage, without human intervention. Digital formats can last that long only under constant maintenance (say once every ten years or so). So we get stuff on Microfilm. The microfilms we work on heavily, I scan in. On the network, I've set up a repository with those images, and the files we're working on (along with a simple revision control system), so that, in theory, I can do most of my work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.
But we still use the reader.
