Article "the" Picture
•  When the article "The" occurs before or at the beginning of a name it is not considered while filing and the name is filed according to the first word: e.g. ‘The Global Filing Co' is filed under ‘Global' and not under ‘The'.

•  If the article occurs in the middle of a name, it is not considered when filing: e.g. Global The Filing Co is written Global (The) Filing Co and filed under ‘Global'.

Surname prefixes  
•  When a last name prefix occurs, it is not considered as a separate unit but as part of the last name: e.g. Le Blanc is written LeBlanc and filed under ‘LeBlanc'. These prefixes include D', Da, Di, Du, Fit, La, Le, Mc, Mac, Von, Von der and others.

•  The correct rule for Mc & Mac is to index them exactly as they are spelt. However if you wish to adopt the same approach as the telephone book (i.e. treat Mc, Mac as if spelt Mac), then it is considered as an indexing rule while filing. This is useful when you are not sure if the name is McDonald or MacDonald.

Year Labels  
•  Year labels indicate when a file was last updated.

•  The first time a file is updated each year, attach a current year label to the file cover.

•  Do nothing more until the next year the file is updated and simply place the current year label on top of the past year label.

•  When you are ready to archive files to a secondary storage area (or destroy) simply look for the colour of the relevant year you are archiving and remove those files.