Sharyn Mayne is my student in INF 116. She sent the following to the forum. It is interesting to see application of information organization at home:
I classify my food cupboard thus:
top shelf is items that are used most often like condiments, vegemite, salt, milo, etc.
2nd shelf down is that are used less often like canned goods. I classify them according to type of packaging with cans on the right and boxes and packages on the left.
3rd shelf (and least likely to make me bend as often) is items used least often like cereal, flour, vinegar etc.
So to summarise, my food cupboard is classified according to:
1. Need
2. Type of packaging
Now my bookshelf is atypical of libraries and very typical of my laziness... just like the food cupboard, my bookshelf is classified according to need with items I haven't read at the top. Books that have been read are moved to the bottom. BUT, when i do a spring clean, i often move my favourite series to the very top shelf, so I can admire them whenever I look at the bookshelf.
Other than need, the books are classified according to Author, then series. For example, the Eddings series is situated to the left of the Jordan series and each series is situated in numerical order e.g. Book 1 is to the left and progresses upward to book 12.
Now, my spare bedroom has been harder to classify and generally I use a Thesaurus which I created myself and use annually or bi-annually, depending on the amount of resources and their condition. It's called the JUNK THESAURUS and I think with a bit of marketing, could become a worldwide tool for household description.
My Junk Thesaurus is so easy to use that a baby could do it. It contains limited broad terms - namely "Junk" and "Useful Stuff". When I acquire new resources for this room, they are given the narrower term "junk to be sorted". Occasionally (i.e. once a year), I will find the need to add a new term, "Rubbish", to the Thesaurus when I reclassify the parts of the room.
Just like the traditional library stocktake, my stocktake of the Spare Bedroom involves alot of dusty moving of objects with 3M sticky notes that classify piles of resources related terms like "Rubbish Junk", "Junk" and "Useful Junk".
During the last stages of the classification, instead of using "Useful Junk", I assign the terms "Storage", "Kitchen drawer", "Bedroom" and "Study". At the end of the process instead of using a broad term like "Rubbish" I use a narrower term - "Garbage bin".
