My Office, circa 1925

[resqgeek]

Thanks go out to melydia for bringing photo above to my attention (click on the photo for a high-resolution view). I love this photograph for several reasons. The setting is remarkable...the old Patent Office building in DC (now home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery). Compared to the relatively sterile modern office buildings we currently work in, this building is a work of art, as is evident from the photo. I would love to work in such a gorgeous building! Our current home is pleasant enough, in its way, but it has none of the character of our original headquarters.

I'm also struck by the file storage. Our record keeping and file retrieval techniques had barely changed when I started working at the office in 1990. While the files were bar coded and a computer system tracked the location of the records as the bar codes were scanned, we still had to physically move paper files around. Searching the patents involved physically sifting through hundreds of printed paper documents. The change to digital record keeping has been swift and very recent. The patent search system was automated in the late 1990's, and we transitioned our application files from paper to digital only in the last five years.

Looking at this photo, I can put myself into the shoes of the clerks shown. I spent my share of time digging through shelves of files looking for an application, or digging through piles of documents searching the patents. We are now training a new generation of employees that have no memory of the paper filing systems or of searching physical documents. They only know this job from the perspective of sitting in front of a computer screen. I'm curious what they would make of this picture, and whether they would feel as much connection to it as I do...