I work with an awesome group of people at Factor. I admire my teammates and every day I learn something new and am challenged to see the world, and its information, in new ways.
For example, a couple weeks ago during a group conversation, we started talking about information modeling and debating the pros and cons of differing approaches. We diverged a bit (it was a late Friday afternoon after all) and started chatting about how we each organize our own stuff. There were some passionate points of view about bookshelves and the order in which you keep their contents.
This made me think about how the choices we make, shaped by our own unique experiences, by our conscious and unconscious points of view, go into our decisions to organize a collection.
Therefore, I put this question to the group:
- Take a picture of something in your house you organize
- Tell me what was your mental model for organizing it? What factors did you take into consideration that played a role in your organization?
The results were fascinating!
What does your organization look like?
For me, I love history and I love books. I have loved both since elementary school and started about that time collecting books, mostly British and European history (and you can see a smattering of childhood books in here as well). Over the years my collection has expanded to several thousand covering everything from art, architecture, philosophy, various crafts, information theory, archives management, but mostly, history. With a Master’s in Library and Info Science, it may not be surprising that I group my books by subject. However, my divergent path for organization starts here; to the aesthetic of the shelf itself and the vignette it creates. Color is important and I sort my books, within each shelf and topic by color. I have also traveled quite a bit, enjoy art & home decoration, so each shelf tells its own story of my life and my experiences.
Something I organize: My shirt closet!
My main organizing principle here is that the shirts I wear most often should be the easiest ones for me to access. So my everyday t-shirts are the leftmost ones, the ones I see first when I open the closet door. After those are more “specialty” shirts: the first group of specialty shirts are holiday-themed shirts (most of them Christmas). The next group of specialty shirts are ones from Zappos. They have some emotional value, so I wear them pretty rarely to keep them looking good. After that come my long-sleeve tees and henleys. Even in winter, I’m more likely to put a jacket over short sleeves, so I don’t use them very much at all. Finally I have my UNLV shirts which I wear to UNLV sports games. I don’t go very much at all, but I have them at the very end because then I can go right to them when I DO want to wear one, instead of having to go hunting around in the middle of the shirts.
My closet is where I’m most proud of my organization. Why? 1) I have complete control of how it looks and keeping it organized 2) I use it multiple times a day and 3) It holds my most valued treasures. When I began to organize my closet most recently, I decided it was time to purge all of the clothes that no longer fit. I then organized items by type – 1) Did they need to be hung up? 2) Were they dressier (work) or casual 3) Seasonal or 4) Accessories – Belts, Hats, Bags. Towards the end of my organization it came down to my accessories. Do I put them in a basket? Is there another way to display them? After doing a little search I found a way to display my items as seen in the picture – clip hangers (hats) and plastic dividers (bags). This has been transformational given I now use the items far more than I did before.
OK: My first information science job, around 1996-1999, was cataloging CDs for the sadly now-defunct Schwann Catalog. We published a quarterly phone book-sized catalog of every available classical CD, broken down by composer, piece, and performer. (We also had a pop version but it never took off.) Record companies — I worked on the classical side — would send us catalogs, sleeves, or actual CDs of their new releases to catalog. One of the perks was that at the end of the quarter we would divvy up the CDs! So in addition to those I had accumulated on my own I ended up with more than 1000 CDs (the rack in the picture holds 1000 and is clearly overflowing).Having worked in the field, and subsequently being somewhat deeply involved in issues in categorization, the issue arose: how to organize more than 1000 physical media objects? The primary concern here is whether to split things up by genre — and genre taxonomy is, really, one of the worst and most subjective kinds — or to alphabetize them all in one large pile; this of course involves sorting artists (for most pop music) alongside names of composers. After experimenting with splitting up genres (which ones? how many? what to do with borderline cases? Is “classical” one genre or many? &c.) I finally gave up and ended up sorting the whole pile in one alphabetical set. This still causes issues: what to do with compilations? But it mostly serves me well, and I enjoy having The Beatles come between Bach and Beethoven.
