Collection organization

After three introductory posts and a long absence (in which everything was due in every single class), let's get down to brass tacks.

Cataloging systems exist for one very important reason. Without such a system in place, good luck finding a specific book in a collection larger than two bookshelves. Now, admittedly, one could simply arrange the books in alphabetical order, either by author or title. Indeed, this system is fine for extremely small, homogeneous collections.

If there's any variety to the holdings, though, you're going to want to arrange like with like. If you're looking for information on, say, the saturation process used to create shortening, then unless you know of an author who specialized in the subject, or even one who wrote in the field of food science, you're out of luck. You're going to be starting with the A's and scanning each and every spine until you find something useful. And if you do happen to know of an author in the field of food science, if he or she didn't write exactly what you need, you're back to square one, since the neighboring authors wrote about the American Civil War and the use of alliteration in John Donne's Holy Sonnets.

What you need is a way of organizing those books such that they can be searched quickly and efficiently. Being forced to browse the collection as a whole, without the ability to go right to the Food Science or even the Chemistry section could turn a five-minute trip to the library into a week-long sojourn amongst the shelves. Therefore, the most common method of organization is by subject area. And this brings us to Authority Control, which I will go into later today or tomorrow.