# Coronavirus disaster in library **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [April 25, 2020, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559 "2020-04-25T16:09:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/21 "2020-04-26T03:58:29Z")
> [@road\_lobo](#): > > I wouldn’t trust that anything this person touched is clean. No attention to detail, no common sense, solipsistic… He probably didn’t remove all of the red M&Ms, either. The _bastard_. ---
**Author:** ![flatlined](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/eb9ed0/32.png) [@flatlined](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flatlined)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/22 "2020-04-26T06:53:57Z")
Brown M&M’s. There actually was a good reason for that. My thought when seeing the pics was: not so bad, the cleaner did it shelf by shelf. Much easier to fix than if the cleaner had pulled the books off in a section and reshelved them in her/his order. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/23 "2020-04-26T07:31:39Z")
Under the conditions, I wouldn’t be so quick to get so judgmental, here, and would rather recognize the “well-intended” part, as mentioned in the article. This isn’t a disaster, and there’s nothing inherently natural about any library ordering system anyway, as the discussion here suggests. I say this as someone who spent three years working in the Berkeley main stacks, completely mesmerized by its unfathomable though somehow poetic internal logic–all of it L of C, naturally. My own collection, in fact, is ordered by size, which allows for a more efficient spacing between the shelves. I know generally where to find a book because I know its size and color. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 8:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/24 "2020-04-26T08:12:23Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947. You’re right, no human being would shelve books like this. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 8:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/25 "2020-04-26T08:46:08Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > It would be pretty surprising for a British library to use the American Library of Congress system. Rather than that quintessentially American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer Dewey? When I was young, big libraries had their own specialist librarians doing accessioning and assigning shelf numbers. My universities were Dewey Decimal, but the numbers were assigned locally, so it didn’t mean you could go to another library and find the same book in the same place. As I understand it, most libraries now just subscribe to a cataloging service, and take shelf number from that. Because it’s cheaper. The advantage of doing local shelf numbering is that you can emphasize particular aspects of the book, and put the book on the shelf where you think it best fits. In a specialist library, using DD just means everything is ordered by the 7th digit or the Authors name, so it’s not terribly useful. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/26 "2020-04-26T14:59:17Z")
I recall a largish used-book store in Bangkok with fiction and non-fiction all lumped together and sorted by title. The 'The ’ section was very large. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/27 "2020-04-26T15:20:24Z")
I hope the cleaner kept each book on the shelf it was already sitting in and just rearranged them shelf by shelf. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/28 "2020-04-26T15:26:49Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > I recall a largish used-book store in Bangkok with fiction and non-fiction all lumped together and sorted by title. The 'The ’ section was very large. That would be a particularly bad system for a used bookstore since you wouldn’t be able to browse according to your interests. While you could find a book if you already knew its title, it would be difficult to find other books on the same subject. A large percentage of my purchases in used bookstores have been of books I never heard of before. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/29 "2020-04-26T16:56:42Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > Rather than that quintessentially American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer Dewey? Melville Dewey was a nutcase, politely referred to as an eccentric. (During his early infatuation with spelling reform he changed his name to Melvil Dui and got fired by the conservative board.) He was one of those impossibly enthusiastic Victorians who meddled in a dozen subjects and left his footprints over most of them. Few know that he invented what’s now called the DDS when he was a smart-ass undergraduate. Consequently, it was totally biased to his time and place and nearly worthless outside of it. It’s completely weird that, according to Wikipedia, it’s used in 135 countries today. Even so, there are advantages of having a universally recognized system. I just can’t imagine how or why that system would be the LoC, developed for the sole purpose of cataloging books sent to the central repository for copyright registration. I assumed the the UK had its own equivalent for its own system, just as every other major country, and that there way no way any local library would ever use LoC. > [@Colibri](#): > > That would be a particularly bad system for a used bookstore since you wouldn’t be able to browse according to your interests. While you could find a book if you already knew its title, it would be difficult to find other books on the same subject. A large percentage of my purchases in used bookstores have been of books I never heard of before. I went to the University of Rochester, which used LoC. I worked in a local branch public library with DDS and seldom if ever went to the big central library. Looking back, it was the difference in size of the stacks rather than the system, but I reveled in finding a book I was interested in and then exploring all the books nearby to uncover titles on the same subject that might be even better for my interests. Far too many people today lazily enter titles into a database and then sort them alphabetically so that you do see all the titles beginning with “The” clumped together on a list. I want to crawl through the screen and shelf read them at gunpoint. (Shelf reading was what we library pages did [yes, we were named pages and yes, we got a lot of fun from that] methodically going through the shelves and making sure that all the books were in proper order after the patrons reshelved them randomly.) ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/30 "2020-04-26T17:07:46Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > That would be a particularly bad system for a used bookstore since you wouldn’t be able to browse according to your interests. While you could find a book if you already knew its title, it would be difficult to find other books on the same subject. A large percentage of my purchases in used bookstores have been of books I never heard of before. [Japanese bookstores arrange books _by publisher_](https://soranews24.com/2019/09/29/why-this-american-cant-stand-japanese-bookstores/)! ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/31 "2020-04-26T17:16:35Z")
> [@Sicks\_Ate](#): > > Makes stocking easier maybe? Shipment from a publisher comes in, you don’t have to run all over the store shelving games. Just take the box to that section and unload. Even then, it seems like a poor choice. If your only goal is to stock new arrivals in the simplest way, you’d just put them on the shelves in the order they were delivered - just unpack the boxes on to the next empty space on the shelves. Sure, you won’t be able to find things later but that’s not your goal. But if you have goals that go beyond stocking shelves, you’d stock things in some kind of order that makes your future work easier. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/32 "2020-04-26T17:18:20Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I went to the University of Rochester, which used LoC. I worked in a local branch public library with DDS and seldom if ever went to the big central library. Looking back, it was the difference in size of the stacks rather than the system, but I reveled in finding a book I was interested in and then exploring all the books nearby to uncover titles on the same subject that might be even better for my interests. Early in my career at the Smithsonian, in the late 1980s, I actually had a stack pass for the Library of Congress. It was wonderful to be able to go in there and see literally almost every book ever published on a subject in the US over the last couple centuries. Unfortunately they tightened things up some years later and the stacks were restricted. I at least still have access (if I’m in Washington) to the Smithsonian libraries. There is a central library, but each of the departments also has their own separate library. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/33 "2020-04-26T17:24:45Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > [Japanese bookstores arrange books _by publisher_](https://soranews24.com/2019/09/29/why-this-american-cant-stand-japanese-bookstores/)! It doesn’t make any more sense in a bookstore than it does in a game store. I’ve also heard that in Japan they number their streets in the order that the buildings were constructed. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/34 "2020-04-26T17:36:02Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > It doesn’t make any more sense in a bookstore than it does in a game store. > > I’ve also heard that in Japan they number their streets in the order that the buildings were constructed. The streets in Tokyo largely are unnamed, is my understanding. The buildings in a postal district are numbered by when they were built, with respect to the entire district, not the street. I know Tokyo is that way. I don’t know about other Japanese cities. ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/35 "2020-04-26T18:50:58Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > The streets in Tokyo largely are unnamed, is my understanding. So _that’s_ what [U2 was singing about](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQXkF1A1SEI)! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/36 "2020-04-26T21:21:48Z")
Duplicate ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/37 "2020-04-26T21:33:58Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Even so, there are advantages of having a universally recognized system. I just can’t imagine how or why that system would be the LoC, developed for the sole purpose of cataloging books sent to the central repository for copyright registration. I assumed the the UK had its own equivalent for its own system, just as every other major country, and that there way no way any local library would ever use LoC. > > I went to the University of Rochester, which used LoC. I worked in a local branch public library with DDS and seldom if ever went to the big central library. Looking back, it was the difference in size of the stacks rather than the system, but I reveled in finding a book I was interested in and then exploring all the books nearby to uncover titles on the same subject that might be even better for my interests. I went to University of California at Davis, which also uses the LoC. The odd thing, to me, for US universities is why the universities use a different system than what, I imagine, every student entering the university used from grade school through high school, the Dewey. While a student at Davis, I just felt that it was an unnecessary thing to add to all the other new things to be learned at university. > [@](#): > > Far too many people today lazily enter titles into a database and then sort them alphabetically so that you do see all the titles beginning with “The” clumped together on a list. I want to crawl through the screen and shelf read them at gunpoint. (Shelf reading was what we library pages did [yes, we were named pages and yes, we got a lot of fun from that] methodically going through the shelves and making sure that all the books were in proper order after the patrons reshelved them randomly.) Until I got to UCD, I worked as a volunteer page at every library I frequented, from 4th grade to graduation from my local community college, and that included volunteering at the base libraries where I was stationed. One of the first things the librarian ensured we pages knew is one does not alphabetize titles under “The” for titles beginning with that word. Another thing, which I really thought was a bit silly, is that names beginning with “Mc” were treated as though they began with “Mac”. I did not volunteer at the university library because the LoC system was just too much of a PITA to deal with. It was bad enough that I had to operate with it for my schoolwork; I was not going to inflict that on myself with my limited free time. > [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > [Japanese bookstores arrange books _by publisher_](https://soranews24.com/2019/09/29/why-this-american-cant-stand-japanese-bookstores/)! The bookstores I shopped at when I was stationed in Japan, admittedly in a small town near Tokyo, intelligently sorted the books on the shelves first by topic and then by author’s name. I never had a problem finding something there. > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Even then, it seems like a poor choice. If your only goal is to stock new arrivals in the simplest way, you’d just put them on the shelves in the order they were delivered - just unpack the boxes on to the next empty space on the shelves. Sure, you won’t be able to find things later but that’s not your goal. There’s a used foreign books store in Itaeweon, Seoul. The store’s operated by an American husband and his Korean wife. The way they sort the books is so horrible I cannot force myself to go into the place anymore when I’m in Seoul. I swear the husband uses what I call [the Carnac method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent). He guesses what the topic of the tome is, often getting the topic wrong, then he puts it on a shelf for that topic, under the first letter of the title. The shelves are laughably divided into sections of the alphabet. Actually, I should say the whole section of the wall is divided. A wall section may have ten shelves, but instead of labeling each shelf for a small section of the alphabet, the whole wall section is labeled, for example, “A ~ H”. There is no further attempt to have any more order than that. Of course that means two books that should be right next to each other very well may have about a hundred or more books between them under this so-called system. > [@Acsenray](#): > > The streets in Tokyo largely are unnamed, is my understanding. The buildings in a postal district are numbered by when they were built, with respect to the entire district, not the street. I discovered something rather helpful for me to find a place in Tokyo while I lived nearby back in the early 1990s. The power poles have rather large metal labels on them, listing what is essentially the street and house address of the poles. It was rather logical. I can’t recall exactly how it was done, but I never had a problem returning to a place after noting the closest power pole’s “address”. While I was teaching in South Korea, the government [revamped their addressing system and it is a marvel to use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addresses_in_South_Korea). The previous system was the same as used in most of Japan still. > [@](#): > > I know Tokyo is that way. I don’t know about other Japanese cities. The Wiki on [the Japanese addressing system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system) tells me: > [@](#): > > Street names are seldom used in postal addresses (except in Kyoto and some Hokkaidō cities such as Sapporo), and most Japanese streets do not have names. You can read more about [special cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system#Special_cases) at this section of that Wiki page. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/38 "2020-04-26T21:38:34Z")
A friend and I very industriously reshelved my parents’ voluminous library by size one day, but the reception for our efforts was … chilly. I think we were five or six. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/39 "2020-04-26T22:34:46Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > Another thing, which I really thought was a bit silly, is that names beginning with “Mc” were treated as though they began with “Mac”. I do this in my own personal filing. “Mc” is just an abbreviation for “Mac.” It makes perfect sense to me to have MacDonald-McDonald together and MacCaffery-McCaffery together instead of MacCaffery-MacDonald-McCaffery-McDonald. I believe in Britain they’re even pronounced identically (I’m not sure about Ireland, but I think so). Historically, they’re the same name and whether the full “Mac” or abbreviations “Mc” or “M’” were used varied by individual. You don’t have to remember which individual uses an abbreviation and which doesn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559/40 "2020-04-26T22:40:25Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > Another thing, which I really thought was a bit silly, is that names beginning with “Mc” were treated as though they began with “Mac”. I do this in my own personal filing. “Mc” is just an abbreviation for “Mac.” It makes perfect sense to me to have MacDonald-McDonald together and MacCaffery-McCaffery together instead of MacCaffery-MacDonald-March-Mansfield-McCaffery-McDonald. I believe in Britain they’re even pronounced identically (I’m not sure about Ireland, but I think so). Historically, they’re the same name and whether the full “Mac” or abbreviations “Mc” or “M’” were used varied by individual. You don’t have to remember which individual uses an abbreviation and which doesn’t. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-disaster-in-library/852559.md?page=3)