INTRODUCTION : In modern days an office acts as information centre. It is a place where information is collected, processed, stored and made available for the conduct of various activities of an organisation. In these modem times there is lot of written communication which generates large amount of papers. Thus the filing, its system and methods become highly important. Filing constitutes the core of record keeping. It serves as important aid to office persons because we cannot rely on memory alone. In order to run the laboratory work we all need to refer some person or to a variety of publications and papers. The problem is where to go and find the proper papers. The correct and efficient filing is answer to the above raised questions. In this unit you will study about various filing systems, their function, types of records, filing procedure, way of cataloguing and record maintenance.

These records become handy in case of emergency. If you are keeping the records of instruments, chemicals, glassware, instructions given from time to time, etc. you will be able to do work and monitor it in a better way. These records can be kept in files, record books and computer files. In this unit you are going to study various filing system, types of records and how the records are kept.