RE: Slide filing

We "prefile" our slides in drawers that are laid out on top of the short term storage cabinets. (The drawers are the same as those used for permanent storage except that they have spring slide spacers built in.) Slides can be placed into these 'open' drawers with lots of space between cases for insertion of more slides as they are returned from our many different faculty members (pathologists). Once all of the cases within a range of accession numbers (or the passage of a predetermined amount of time) the slides are transfered in numerical order to the permanent file drawers. The slides are held in short term storage for about a year until they are moved to deep storage (larger room, farther away). We have the same filing cabinets in all facilities to accomodate moving slides without removing them from the drawers.

You might try having your filing personnel put a colored dot on the back of the slides that they file (behind the labeled end) using a permanent colored sharpie (different color for each filer). A much more onerous task would be to keep a filing log which you could implement periodically rather than permanently whenever you notice a return to poor filing habits. (One such short form of a log would be to simply print out a list of accession numbers and have each person initial or use a colored marker to check off that they filed the slides for that number.)