Collections

I guess you can have a large collection of just about anything.  A good-sized city, a modern university, all can have many employees, records, offices, restrooms, hallways, elevators.  My life has been affected by libraries.  When I was a part time employee of the Enoch Pratt Library, the main branch had separate rooms for books and periodicals (magazines).  I worked in the History room.

The book “A Place for Everything” by Judith Flanders discusses aspects of the development of methods and practices for arranging books in such a way that they could be located by someone trying to find books of a certain kind.  When you think about it, there are similar problems whether dealing with hundreds of soldiers or weapons or tools or pictures or movies or lessons or students’ tests.

Individual families have stores of possessions that they may not even remember obtaining.  In a similar way, libraries of books or painting and photos may include just what someone needs but without anyone knowing.

I have read that in some libraries, the best thing to do to locate what is sought is to ask the librarian where that item might be.