Storing and locating

The book by Judith Flanders, “A Place for Everything” and the book by Deirdre Mask, “The Address Book” have some commonalities that don’t stand out.  When you have bound books in large numbers and someone builds shelves for them, you soon run into the problem of finding that book that happens to be on your mind.  In a somewhat similar way, when you have buildings along avenues and streets and you want to do that modern thing and deliver messages written on paper, you run into the coding problem of using a short code on each message as to where the message should be delivered.  Some places in the world, even with many people living close to each other, still don’t have addresses.  If you have an address, respect it and be proud of it.  

My wife was a school librarian and later taught school librarianship at a university.  She got into that activity at a time and place where people were creating “slide-tapes”, recordings of speech meant to be played in conjunction with the showing of a set of slides.  School librarians were confronted with the problem of storing and then finding one of the collected items when needed.  She wrote her doctoral dissertation on similar work being done by the US Dept. of Agriculture’s library of new types of materials.  Often, new types of material have physical characteristics that require new types of storage, labeling and tools to locate them.