n.a sheet of heavy paper stock or cardboard, scored near the middle, its halves bent so they rest side by side, and used as a loose cover to keep documents and other flat materials together, especially for purposes of filingMinogue 1945, 118Whenever oversize material must be filed separately and cross-indexed, or papers kept together with enclosures either by stapling or filing in a suitably labeled envelope or folder, or individual documents removed, repaired, and reinserted, the speed of the whole flattening process will be considerably retarded.Friis 1950, 146–147In the instance of permanent cartographic records a standardization, insofar as the records would lend themselves to it, would be strongly advisable particularly as to equipment, manner of filing, kind, size and durability of folder or envelope used to enclose the records, and the file identification of each folder and map.Ernst 1966, 65Letters from one-time correspondents were collected into A–Z folders, while separate folders were created for repeaters.Stender and Walker 1974, 546One byproduct of this operation is a computer-generated label which is attached to a file folder containing the recovered and dried records.Lucas 1976, 7The same holds true for internal arrangement within folders or files in a structured series. The time spent in meticulous sorting of individual items, in a context where precise order is not essential to their usefulness (such as routine correspondence), might better be employed elsewhere.Berner 1976, 48–49Though Holmes distinguished five discrete levels—depository, record group, series, file folder, and item—he expressly limited his paper to the experience of the National Archives.Schmidt and Law 2009, 69These folders, containing correspondence between McMillan and university administrators, documentation of departmental meetings and deliberations, and the general management of department activities, help to highlight the evolution of the department.Gentry 2014, 67Only a select few items were housed in protective casings, such as binders or manila folders, though the documents’ subject headers allowed me to quickly identify the contents of each item.Computinga directory structure that maintains files into groupsWheeler 1991, 84The Search Files option does not appear, from the demonstration software, to be user-friendly. In addition, it does not break the search down to the folder level.Broaddus 2008, 49“File” is thus already hierarchically stable as a part of the intellectual tag structure, and the tag’s attribute-destination “folder” should conceivably be able to cede to “fie.” “Folder” is consistently intellectual, as well as consistently physical, whereas “box” is only consistently, reliably physical.Prom 2011b, 12Some of my email had been stored in local folders created by Alpine—an old terminal style email application originally developed for a Unix environment.a printed leaflet designed to be folded so that a person can carry it easily within a hand and fit it into a pocket or pursev.to place papers documents or other flat materials within a file folderFleckner 1991, 9But the archivists had taken all the fun out of it—the materials were antiseptically foldered, boxed, and listed. Wheeled out on carts, they were like cadavers to be dissected by first-year medical students.McCrea 2006, 287In some cases, as when we are processing at the box or series level, we are no longer neatly foldering all loose or irregularly housed materials.adj. foldered[definition in progress]Burke 2000, 22, fn. 13In the NHPRC files there is an unattributed draft bill for this purpose. NHPRC informal files (stack area 7W1, Archives I), Box 1704-1, not foldered.Altermatt and Hilton 2012, 181Space was limited and boxes of preliminarily foldered materials quickly covered the work area.
Notes
Folders1 usually have tabs where a title can be written. Tabs commonly run a fifth, a third, a half, or the full length of the folder.Five Xerox employees, working on an early graphical user interface (for the Star Information System) intentionally chose to employ folder2 in a computing sense to help users better understand how to navigate within the system. They explained this in the article “Designing the Star User Interface” from the April 1982 issue of Byte: “We decided to create electronic counterparts to the physical objects in an office: paper, folders, file cabinets, mail boxes, and so on—an electronic metaphor for the office.”Timetables and brochures are common examples of folders3 in the third sense.
