what is order?

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 17 March 2007 02:58:07

Every so often on a slow news day at work, I wonder about re-organising the dispensary. It is not a good lay out, for reasons that probably wouldn't make sense to anyone who doesn't work with alphabetised products. Hmm actually I'll try, using a library as an example.

Imagine a library, with really long shelves. These shelves have subdivisions, at intervals of about a meter, but are essentially 4-5 meters long - I would call these subdivisions "bays". There are about 6-7 levels in a bank of shelves. Do you have this image in your mind? No? Then stop and read no further until you have imagined the long shelves.

Now imagine that these shelves are filled with books, in alphabetical order by author. So far this sounds reasonable. So you want to find The Chalet School in Exile... hmm no, not that one actually as it's hard to know whether to look under Brent or Dyer.. how about Summer Term at St Claire's by Enid Blyton. So you take a stab at roughly where you think the B books might be. Assuming that there is a roughly even distribution of authors in various parts of the alphabet, you would probably look in the first bay, towards the bottom. So you stoop down and find The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy, at the far end of the bottom shelf of the first bay. You then stand up and move a step to the right and behold! There on the top shelf are the Enid Blyton books. Unfortunately Summer Term is out at the moment, however <sixth Form at Mallory Towers is there and you've been waiting to read that for months!

Now imagine that the bays do not represent any sort of barrier to the shelving system. The As start at the top left and carry on towards the top right, where they morph into Bs. The Bs take up two shelves (due to the Secret Seven and Famous Five) and end midway across a shelf.

On the surface, this is a valid way of organising the books. They are in alphabetical order after all. But it's a stupid way to organise books when efficient selection is important. What if you need a book by Elvira McSweeney... you first hazard a guess that it'll be in the middle somewhere. But if you take a sample from the centre of this bank of shelves and end up with something by Frederick Looton, you are no better off. Clearly two samples are needed to ascertain the trend... but even with Thomas Teapot being located down two rows and a bit to the left, you are no better off - you may have identified a likely vertical location of your book, however because the horizontal plane is so long, with uneven quantities of surnames starting with any letter, you will still have to traverse the length of the bookshelves a few times before finding your book. This is silly!

And what's so good about the alphabet anyway? I have often pondered rearranging the dispensary in order of tablet colour. I think that would be pretty cool.