Quotes About Cataloging

You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing.

I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties.

Is the purpose of theoretical physics to be no more than a cataloging of all the things that can happen when particles interact with each other and separate? Or is it to be an understanding at a deeper level in which there are things that are not directly observable (as the underlying quantized fields are) but in terms of which we shall have a more fundamental understanding?

Kate) had found multiple titles by individual authors scattered willy-nilly through the collection. It made her want to pull her hair out. Obviously!- an individual author's body of work all belonged on one shelf, the works arranged, in turn, by whatever system was most suitable: by volume number, alphabetically by title, or by the year of publication, or, in case of playwrights, works grouped by genre- tragedies with tragedies, comedies with comedies, histories with histories, and so on.

Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.

Lists have always implied social order.

I was vaguely attracted to both library science and accounting, for the way that these disciplines impose order on chaos.

Ah, the Dewey decimal system…humankind's single greatest achievement." From Candace Fleming's The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School

cardinal sin in a library, where the commitment to findability is absolute.

The mind's cross-indexing puts the best librarian to shame.

I collect movies. So I have all those in binders. I don't have the DVDs out. I put them in binders.

I used to make up names when I used to catalog my stuff.

You need a good memory to use the library. How else do you find a book again after you've read it?" - Tayend

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

I'm a librarian," he said.

In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.

Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.

I'm obsessed with making lists.

Shera's Two Laws of Cataloging: Law #1, No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger. Law #2: No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the cataloging.

had taken it upon herself to sit through as many of the devil's entertainments as she could tolerate, cataloging every sin.

You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22 , which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.

To organize all my comics, I've been making custom cabinets.

In a sense our brains are like an archive, where material is well-preserved and properly catalogued, but also dissolves, or becomes re-shelved or misplaced, or in some cases never makes it there to begin with.

library catalogs are a tangible example of humanity's effort to establish and preserve the possibility of order.