Dave's Free Press: Journal

violence, pornography, and rude words for the web generation

 

Recent posts

(subscribe)

Recently commented posts

(subscribe)

Journals what I read

geeky politics rant silly religion meta music perl weird drinking culture london language transport sport olympics hacking media maths web photography etiquette spam amazon film bastards books bryar holidays palm telecoms cars travel yapc bbc clothes rsnapshot phone whisky security home radio lolcats deafness environment curry art work privacy iphone linux bramble unix go business engineering kindle gps economics latin anglo-saxon money cars environment electronics
Sun, 9 Nov 2003

Libraries, and the ordering thereof

With new bookshelves comes the need to fill 'em. Two of the eight shelves are obvious - dictionaries, thesauruses, and other books about English As She Is Spoke. That leaves a handy little hole where I can dump my mail and stuff.

But what of the others? Comic books, obviously, being oversize, fit nicely in Ten Ton Monster-sized shelves and I guess that games and books about games fit well with that mini-theme. Then, being a computer geek, there's plenty of computery and mathematics books. They go together nicely too. But that's the easy bit.

How do I split up fiction? Do I arrange it by genre or by author? Do I split it into "serious" fiction and "the rest"?

Histories, biographies, politics, and philosophy - how on earth do I disentangle that lot? Is Plato's "Republic" philosophy or politics? Is Suetonius's "Lives of the Caesars" history or biography? What about alternate histories, like Sobel's "For Want of a Nail" - file under history or fiction? And if under fiction, under historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, or what?

Right now, I only have a thousand or so volumes, split across 20 shelves in two rooms. It's hard enough to find a particular title now - I can't even *remember* what I have now, and every month or so I find a duplicate lurking somewhere - and I hate to think what it'll be like in another few years. So, I need a decent filing system, which will scale up to at least of the order of ten thousand titles, and ideally more.

It must ... allow quick access to a particular title; allow easy return of a title to the correct place so that it can be found again; allow easy browsing amongst related titles; make it hard to have duplicates; allow for continuous growth in all categories; cope with foreign languages; and not make me reorganise all the damned shelves every few months to fit in new acquisitions. And preferably without a bloody database, although if absolutely necessary I might do that.

This must be a solved problem!

Posted at 14:10 by David Cantrell
Permalink

Archive