A Librarian’s View on Alphabetization

I came across a video this morning about a librarian with a hypothetical problem: 1,280 books arrived out of nowhere, and it’s the day before school starts, and so they have to alphabetize all of them as fast as possible. Here’s the video:

Now, a few comments by yours truly.

First of all, if a librarian got 1,280 books all at once, there’s no way in Hades they’re going to have them ready to be checked out by students the next day. Why not? For a number of reasons, the biggest one being that you don’t just alphabetize the books. You catalog them. I’m assuming the librarian has other books in their collection, so having those random 1,280 in alphabetical order isn’t going to do squat. They need to be entered into the catalog so that students can actually find the books. (Or is this a library where they just dump the books on the floor or something?)

Beyond that, alphabetizing them isn’t the way any librarian would organize them. Who in their right mind would do that with any large collection??? We would give each one a call number, which would be determined based on the subject of the book, so that when people are looking for their books, they’ll find similar books around it, which might help them find more information. Just having the books in alphabetical order does nothing other than allow you to find any title easily if you know we have it and know what it’s called.

But let’s assume the librarian really just needs to alphabetize fast. Even then, I don’t think they’d go with the method the video portrays. Why not? Because we’re not computers, for crying out loud. The first thing I’d do is to put the books into 26 different piles, one for each letter of the alphabet. Right away, that’s 1,280 decisions, but it gets your individual sections down to something much more manageable. From there, it’s not hard to alphabetize. We can make multiple decisions at once, because we do this all the time. We can glance over the titles, grab the ones that are at the beginning, and put them in their place in one fell swoop. None of this “one book at a time” garbage.

However, one final big element the video’s missing is . . . if school starts the next day, there’s no way in the world any of those students will come looking for a book tomorrow. Chances are, they won’t even be thinking about books until a month down the road, when they need to research. And when they do need to research, they’ll likely just be using databases to find journal articles, because students these days don’t really like using books for research.

There’s just no way a librarian would stress about this situation at all. Sheesh. Settle down, people.

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