Object of the week: What’s a Kalamazoo?

“Have you checked the Kalamazoo?” It’s a surprisingly common question around the archive, usually followed by the response: “Good idea!” Data is a big deal in archiving – it’s how we know what we have in the collection and where it came from. These days that means databases, spreadsheets and exports, but for the first 50-plus years of the BFI National Archive, from its founding in 1935, that meant paper. And for stationary geeks out there, it meant some pretty magnificent filing paraphernalia such as the Kalamazoo.

These hard-bound, loose-leaf binders are the archive’s Domesday Book. Nestled quietly in the rolling-shelf stacks, these venerable ancestors of our modern Collections Information Database (CID) patiently safeguard nuggets of insight that have never quite made it to digital records. 

Kalamazoo is a brand name belonging to a Birmingham-based company founded in the 1880s. Enterprising businessman Oliver Moreland visited the Michigan town of Kalamazoo and discovered a form filing system for businesses that he brought back to the UK. 

Some decades later, their custom printed, colour-coded slips with standardised fields – ‘Acquisition title’, ‘Date of release’, ‘Reason for selection’ – were custom ordered by the BFI. For each new acquisition to the collection a slip would be wound into the typewriter by generations of cataloguers, annotated by pen and pencil over the years.

Each of the 41 volumes is stocked full of a rainbow of forms organised alphabetically regardless of genre, putting some unlikely films back-to-back. A typical example spans from the 1962 Soviet comedy Sem Nyanek to a silent “autobiography of a sheep in the first year of its life”, Through Sheep’s Eyes (c 1923). 

These are physical manifestations of the spread and diversity of the collection and the countless hours put into its documentation, a piece of analogue buried treasure in a digital age.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.