Douglas Daily Dispatch

Washington Letter
By RODNEY DUTCHER
NEA Service Writer

WASHINGTON—In the state department is probably the most complete existing collection of information about the affairs of the outside world.
The Bureau of Indexes and Archives is the liaison section of all government agencies for obtaining and recording facts of every description from all foreign countries. It has at least 10,000,000 papers tucked away in 8000 or 9000 filing cases, dating back to 1906, and most of them mean something or other.
The idea is that if anyone connected with the government asks for any information whatever on the internal affairs of any foreign nation the Bureau of Indexes and Archives, working with an elaborate but simple decimal index system, can locate it within two minutes.
Lots of Military Facts.
Naturally, this is better than any encyclopedia or library because the information is constantly kept up to date by American diplomatic, consular and other agents abroad.
The state department itself is especially interested in collecting military, naval and political information likely to be useful in its dealings with other governments, but that's only a part of what it has on hand.
Among the subheadings it uses in cataloguing the rest of the world one observes such items as Domestic Animals, Boy Scouts, Game Laws, Flowers, Entertainment, Fine Arts, Public Health and Animal Diseases. When the state department knows about such things as those in Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Costa Rica, Luxemburg and Iraq you might almost say it knows everything.
There are about 140 persons in this Bureau of Indexes and Archives and last year they handled 1,340,000 pieces of incoming mail, recording, indexing, routing and filing. Much of this mail came in the diplomatic pouches from foreign service officials, guarded by complex locks, but there is always a big influx of American mail following the development of important situations in world affairs—especially anything that concerns peace or disarmament.
Mail clerks take first crack at the letters and roughly classify them for distribution among the bureau's 11 record sections—with titles such as Far Eastern, Latin-American, Western European and Administrative where they are given minute classification. Record clerks in these sections list and make the necessary marks on each communication, determining its routing and often joining it with previous correspondence for the aid of the receiving official. Some of the material is very confidential and is carried in locked boxes.
Each piece of mail then goes through a reviewing desk which checks the classification and sends it direct to its immediate destination. Anything on labor conditions in England goes to the department's division of Western European affairs, anything on Chinese famines to the Far Eastern division and so on.
The foreign service officer who receives the paper then sees whether it requires any action. He may mark it for filing, in which case it comes back to a tally desk which removes the charge. All incoming papers are charged up, as a book from a lending library.
"The lampposts in our road have been repainted."
"Yes, I noticed it when my husband came home."
—Flum, Vienna.