Thursday, November 8, 2007

Shelving logic

Shelving logic. Does that mean "how do you shelve logic?" No, silly... it's how you use logic to shelve most efficiently. I suppose some people like running back and forth across the library and shelving one book at a time. They must simply not care if things don't get accomplished. This has been bugging me for a long time, so I made a quick illustration of how one might see books waiting to be shelved in the back room of a library.

Each letter represents a section of the library in which those books need to be shelved. Now, say you have a small cart and you can choose whichever of these items you want to put on the cart and take out to shelve. What do you choose? Do you just randomly grab as many books as will fit on your cart? Do you take the two A sections from the third cart? No!!! What the hell is wrong with people?? You take all of the A's from all of the carts. Or if you're in a different kind of mood, take the B's and C's from all the carts. That way you can shelve them all at the same time without randomly walking back and forth across the library! Why do people want to be inefficient? Gheez!