Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?

[etherial]

rosinavs and I are entering a two-phase stuff organization plan. The first phase consists of buying and building shelving units and putting all of our stuff into bins on these shelving units. Phase I is already underway.

Phase II will be to label, organize, and arrange these bins in some sort of reasonable fashion. This begs the question: What sort of organizational scheme would be good for this? I'm envisioning something like the dewey decimal system where every bin gets a number: AB.CD where AB encodes the subject matter: fabric, yarn, crafting notions, camping gear, musical instruments, travel supplies, family mementos, spare bedding, etc. and CD is just a two digit bin number.

Anybody have experience organizing an arbitrary number of bins of things?

PS - Anybody in Mass have a geiger counter? We have recently been gifted some Steampunk jewelry and I want to know the radiation dosage.

Comments

[contradictacat.livejournal.com]

You will want to ask bleemoo about this. He likes cataloging. That said, organization systems seem to follow the rule of "If it works for you and you can find things reliably in it, go you!" especially since it's going to be for your own personal use.

Also: The way Dewey works is through decimal places- so if it's number ABC.XYZ, A means the general subject, B specifies further, C specifies even further, and XYZ just go into more detail about the item in specific. So for you, A could be Fabric, B could designate type, say, Satin, and depending on how far you want to go down the rabbit hole, you could have C for color or things like that.

re: If it works for you...

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Whatever blee (or anyone else suggests) will surely be modifed over time. I'm just trolling for ideas.

KISS

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

No offense, but if you're going to label every bin, why not just put a label on each bin designating what's in the bin?

Re: KISS

[etherial.livejournal.com]

So I can browse a list of bins and walk down the hallway to the exact bin I want, sorted in order by catalog number.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Why is your steampunk jewelry irradiated?

re: irradiated

[etherial.livejournal.com]

If the parts came from a dismantled watch that had radium paint (old glow in the dark tech), they might be radioactive.

[evan712.livejournal.com]

My roommate can probably get access to the QCC geiger counter. He can't borrow it, but if you brought your stuff to QCC, he could scan it for you.

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

I label bins with their contents and arrange them in order of subject: crafts, sewing, photography, tools, pet stuff, baking stuff. Like that. It's worked really well for me.

[treyvana.livejournal.com]

I have access to all sorts of radiological monitoring stuff at work...

[bleemoo.livejournal.com]

The rumors are true, I do hope to be a cataloger one day when I grow up. Having said that... designing a catalog for someone else's stuff can be difficult. If you wanted to sort your books, I could give you some advice on that. For something like "stuff," given the lack of pre-existing systems, you really need to build something from the ground up, and it will work much better for you if you design it based on your preferences and desires. Your basic idea seems to make sense. If you have an excessively large amount of stuff, you may need to modify it to keep it from getting too cumbersome (i.e., if you have 23 bins of fabric, you may want to subdivide the fabric somehow), but the idea is sound. If you have specific questions I'd be happy to ponder them.

re: 23 bins of fabric

[etherial.livejournal.com]

Not yet. But we have neighbors at over 75 bins of fabric.