Librarians like to organize things. Because our library is organized, we can easily find the one book you want in our collection of some 32,000 items. If a book is misshelved, it’s difficult to find it among the other 31,999 items. While we are careful to put books back where they belong, they don’t always end up in the right place.

Libraries have organized items in a number of different ways through the years. Early libraries organized by acquisition date. The oldest books were at the beginning of the shelves, and the newest ones at the end. Unless you knew when the library purchased the book, it was tough to find things quickly. The placement might change due to the size of the book too. The big books went on the big book shelf. On the other hand, these libraries didn’t loan out their books. Sometimes books were chained to their shelves, which reduced their chance of being stolen. Early libraries stored books on their sides rather than on end.

The Library of Alexandria (circa 285 BC-260 AD) organized materials by subject. A librarian named Callimachus developed a system called Pinakes to organize the 500,000 scrolls in the third century BC. Pinakes was Greek for “tablets.” The scrolls were sorted into bins by category then alphabetized by author. The eleven different categories included rhetoric (persuasive), law, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science, and miscellaneous.

Alexandria’s library was large, and each category would have many bins full of scrolls. Storing scrolls this way made sense, but without any idea of what the library contained, researchers would have a difficult time finding whether the library had a particular item.

Recognizing this, Callimachus developed what we would call a bibliography. This was an early version of the library card catalog. He noted each scroll’s title, author, author’s birthplace, father’s name, teachers with whom he studied, and their education. He also included a biography of the author, a summary of the work and any other information he felt would be useful. Today we call that metadata. Rather than putting it on several different cards and filing them in a catalog, we make it all accessible through a catalog search.

Callimachus was a scholar who wrote over 800 pieces of literature in a number of genres, but he excelled as a poet. He wrote short (for the time) poems, rather than 500 page epic poems like Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Most of Callimachus’ works have been lost to time, but here are a quick few lines, part of a larger work:

“my good poet, feed my victim as fat as possible, but keep your Muse slender. This, too, I order from you: tread the way that wagons do not trample. Do not drive in the same tracks as others or on a wide road but on an untrodden path, even if yours is more narrow.” According to Wikipedia, it means something like, “everyone else is writing epic poetry, be different and write short poems.”

Outside of libraries, interior decorators sometimes organize books by color, which can be visually appealing. A recent trend is to place the pages rather than the spines facing out on a shelf. A person who displays their books in this fashion may not have much to contribute to a book discussion.

Currently there are three main ways to organize a library. Many public libraries use the Dewey Decimal System. Most colleges organize their items by using what’s called Library of Congress, or LC. Some libraries and most bookstores use a system called BISAC. This was developed by the book industry. If you have shopped in a book store, you have experienced it.

Over the next few columns I will explain how each system works.

Article by Sherry Preston