Grocery shopping for library students
Walk into any grocery store. After about 30 seconds, one could figure out where the cereal is located. Why? Most grocery stores follow a simple, unspoken organization method. Cereal is with the other breakfast foods. It generally near the baking aisle and the juice aisle. Sure, this makes sense to us, but why? Why not near the milk? You need milk with cereal.
Weinberger makes excellent comparisons to daily life while talking about organizational systems. Most things are miscellaneous. I am starting to believe, however, that organizational methods are social constructs. This might be obvious to most people, but I am just ‘getting’ it. Most of us agree that, in the silverware drawer, knives go with knives, forks with forks. If how a library is organized is generally agreed upon, then why is it so confusing to users? Or do we assume confusion? Anyway, I want to ask a group of frequent public/academic library users to create their perfect library. Let’s see what happens. Maybe we could learn something, or nothing and it has probably been done a million times with no empirical evidence of it ever working. Enough, back to organization methods…
However, some people have [knives, spoons, forks] while others have [spoons, forks, knives]. Same concept, different ideas. My thought is, “this is where social tagging could work”. Not everyone thinks in the same search terms. Sure, they are similar, but not the same. So why not, once I find a book in my local OPAC, I add a couple words that make sense to me. That way, next time, I might find the book faster. There are libraries who are using social tagging. USC libraries are having great success with it.
Sure, you’ll some people might tag items to be silly. They might tag Inception with “greatest movie ever made”. Jury is still out on whether that is true, or not. (Not. I am in the minority here, so it works.)
I think I like the idea of everything being miscellaneous. The idea that everything belongs everywhere. It makes organization less stressful. More creative. More accessible. Less intimidating. Anyone can organize everything!
I’ll probably get kicked out of library school for this.
As long as we are being honest, I prefer the Dewey Decimal system.
I’ll never work a reference desk again.
A response to reading a couple chapters of “Everything is Micellaneous” by David Weinberger.
