One of the tests of an organisation such as the League was whether its officials could quickly put their hands on all relevant papers.
The system to ensure this was called the Registry. The League used an adaptation of the classification system of the British Foreign Office.
All official papers (letters, notes, drafts, etc.), confidential or non-confidential, were filed and kept in the Registry. That is, everything on paper produced or received by the League.
The material was arranged in files, cardboard folders containing all the papers relevant to a particular question.
All documents were held in the folder by a metal-tipped cord drawn through holes punched in the left upper corner of the file and documents.
The last letter received was the top letter of the file.
No correspondence could be removed from the file unless the Registry was notified by the section concerned.
No document was circulated without being fixed into a file.
The files were kept in steel cabinets in the Registry, classified by the names of the sections of the League.
There were eight messengers in the Registry who took the files to the offices of those officials who needed them and then replaced them when the officials had finished with the files.
There existed only a few secret files, one of which contained the minutes of the secret meetings of the Council of the League. These files were kept by the Registrar himself, in his office, under lock and key, and the schedules and the numbering of the documents were made in his office.
These secret files could be consulted only by the Secretary-General or the Under Secretaries-General, and were brought to them in sealed envelopes by a responsible official of the Registry, not by messenger.
Only Directors or heads of services could, in exceptional cases, take a file home, and the Registry had to be notified.
The Registry consisted of three branches: classification, registration, and index.
The correspondence coming to the League was received by the League of Nations post office, which delivered it to the Registry.
Some sections, such as the Library, received their mail direct, but in principle the Registry received all mail and only letters marked ‘personal’ or ‘private’ were delivered directly to the addressee.
Each League section had a classification number under which was filed all the correspondence concerning that section.
The sections were (with some changes of name and structure over the years): Political, Administrative Commissions (e.g., the Saar, Danzig), Legal, Minorities, Intellectual Cooperation, Mandates, Disarmament, Health, Communications and Transit, Economic and Financial, Social Questions, Opium, Information, Council, Assembly, Library, Treasury, Internal Administration, Publications and Refugees.
Each file had three numbers: the first indicated the section to which it belonged; the second indicated the incoming number of the first letter or document in the file; the third indicated the number of the file series.
Mail arrived at the Registry from the post office in the morning and was sorted at once by the classification branch. All new correspondence received on a given day was numbered in its sequence (the middle number).
The classification branch placed the letters in their cardboard folders and sent them to the registration branch.
The registration branch entered the number of the folder in the appropriate section register, wrote the title and the subtitle on the folder, and numbered and classified the correspondence in each folder.
The index branch entered on the index cards all new correspondence included that day in the file.
If the contents of the file were confidential, notation of the fact was made in two places only: the front page of the file was stamped with Confidential, in large red letters, and the classification card was stamped Confidential.
The file so stamped was always sent in a sealed envelope.
If a section asked for the confidential files of another section, the Registry asked the permission of that section.
Once the new communication was classified and registered in the Registry and put in a file, it was taken then by messenger to the ‘action section’, that is, the section which needed to respond to the incoming letter.
It took about fifteen minutes to start a new file and five to ten minutes to take the file to its action section.
When the messenger arrived at the section with the file it was handed to the secretary of the section who was responsible for the record of files received by the section and for the circulation of them within the section.
Each official of the Secretariat had In and Out trays in which the secretary of the section would place files and from which the messengers collected files.
The sections could not forward files from one section to another without notifying the Registry which marked on the outgoing card ‘Passed to …’ But the normal procedure was to send the file back to the Registry first.
If a file was needed urgently for a meeting, it was directly dispatched by messenger.
Letters written by the sections were called the out-letter files and sections were responsible for placing in the files two copies on heavy paper of each outgoing letter. One was placed in the file on top of the letter it answered, and other was inserted, in chronological order, in a special out-letter file.
Drafts of large reports and minutes were called Bulky Enclosures and were kept in special envelope files called Bulky Enclosures. They were not usually circulated because of their volume. A note was placed in the file mentioning the existence of the relevant Bulky Enclosure.
A fireproof room with a special lock was built in the basement to hold the Bulky Enclosures and the confidential files.
Within a section, at the end of each day, the secretary had to place under lock and key all confidential files currently in that section.
When the Registry received a communication which needed to be added to a file which was not at that moment in the Registry — that is, a file that was circulating — a messenger would be sent to fetch the file. If the messenger found the file on the desk of an official when the official was out of the room, the messenger left a slip stating that the file had been taken back to Registry and would be sent back as soon as possible.
Files could be requested by telephone by the secretary of the section or by officials.
After 7.30 p.m. there was a Registry official on night duty.
Some of the correspondence was summarised daily by an official of the Registry. This was called the Daily Synopsis. It could consist of letters from well-known individuals, important proposals, discoveries, appointments, appeals, decisions of important character, frontier incidents, circumstances which might disturb the international peace, and so on.
It was sent to the Information section before 9.30 a.m. This was considered to be a confidential document and was intended for circulation only within the Secretariat.
While the correspondence and files of the sections of the Secretariat were, in theory, handled, established, and kept by the Registry, for practical reasons, some sections established duplicate files independently of the Registry. They did this either because they were authorised to function autonomously, or because they kept parallel files close at hand for their own use.