Thomas Harrison invented a wooden filing cabinet in the 1640's for storing slips of paper. Each slip could be hooked onto tin plates which contained the topical or subject headings that were arranged in alphabetical order.

Harrison's description was anonymously published with corrections and improvements by Vincent Placcius in De arte excerpendi. Vom gelehrten Buchhalten liber singularis (Stockholm/Hamburg, 1689), 124–59, in his hand-book on excerpting systems.

Update 2024-03-18: The 1740s reference here must be a misprint and is perhaps 1640s as Harrison was a 17th century person and Placcius published results in 1689.

Hartlib Papers 30/4/47A, Ephemerides 1640, Part 2.

In extolling the Ark of Studies created by Thomas Harrison, Samuel Hartlib indicated that the combinations of information and the potential links between them created the "argumentative part" of the system. In some sense this seems to be analogous to the the processing power of an information system if not specifically creating its consciousness.

Cevolini, Alberto. “Die Erfindung des Zettelkastens als Vergessensmaschine: Eine historische und wissenssoziologische Einführung.” Polarisierte Welten. Verhandlungen des 41. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Bielefeld 2022 41 (September 29, 2023). https://publikationen.soziologie.de/index.php/kongressband_2022/article/view/1564.

Is this the same thing as the arca studiorum? I suspect it is.

Thomas Harrison used the word machina to describe his 'Ark of Studies', a filing cabinet for notes and excerpts from other works. This represents part of a discrete and very specific change on the continuum of movement from the ars memoria (artificial memory) to the ars excerptendi (note taking). Within the rhetorical tradition relying on creating memorable images for topics (res) and words (verba) the idea of an ark was often used as a memory palace as seen in Hugh of St. Victor's De arca Noe mystica, or ‘‘The Ark of Noah According to the Spiritual Method of Reading" (1125–30). It starts the movement from natural and artificial memory to a form of external and mechanical memory represented by his physical filing cabinet.

Reference Yates and Carruthers for Hugh of St. Victor.

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_IgMVAAAAQAAJ/page/n155/mode/2up

On page 138 Placcius shows an (uncredited?) version of Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies.

p 140:

Reference for this as well?

Is this the same piece of library furniture that I've also recently read of Leibniz using?