A Simple Slide Classification System
Dimitri Tselos · College Art Journal · 1959
This article is about a simple and relatively new classification system which has been in use at the University of Minnesota for the past ten years. Following experience with ten other systems the author devised it in order to avoid the complexity and inflexibility of the familiar letter-number types and to make the new system less a mechanical and more a living, and even an educational device. The system depends almost entirely on familiar terms and abbreviations and rarely permits or needs the use of numbers. The pertinent information which identifies and classifies the art objects is placed on the label in an order proceeding from the general to the specific and the sequence of regions, countries, art-types, subtypes, etc., is almost always arranged alphabetically. The system does not consist of two separate patterns, one for identification and another for filing, but the same identification pattern becomes also one for filing by a process of underlining certain identifying items on the label when need...