Resolution #4. Reduce Clutter

This has been a resolution of a lot of people I know!

In the webinar I showed how two different members who shared the book Taming the Office Tiger: The Complete Guide to Getting Organized at Work by Barbara Hemphill, used two different philosophies about tagging books. One didn’t use any, the other described their books really well.

Tags are NOT Clutter. They should always be used to describe the subject as well as to develop a channel into other people’s collections.

If you look at the main record for this book, you’ll notice in the tag cloud, various ways to describe the subject the title implies. If you click on “Organization”, it leads you to a listing of all the information Librarything has assembled about the tag “Organization”.

This would include the last 15 books tagged with Organization. If one of those strike your curiosity…as I write this the last added is Order from Chaos : A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life by Liz Davenport, you can click on it and, if it looks interesting, you can click on one of the order houses on the right side of the screen to see a review of it, order information, etc.

Tags tie all this great information together. Tags do what subject headings do in our library classification systems, help you go directly to an area of knowledge and find your targeted resource as well as other similar resources co-located next to it. To get the most out of your Web 2.0 endeavors, start first at considering your tag scheme, and by seeing what other members seem to be using on a few of your sample resources. Don’t forget the most popular tags are the largest in font size. I’d think, if you want to share your collection with the largest group, that you’d be using those.

Besides tags, if you have Reducing Clutter as a New Year’s resolution to make your library great in 2008, below are exercises and resources cited from Castles that can help you get organized to organize.

Exercises:

1. Review the “5 ways to zap clutter” in your work setting. List inhibitors for each method (e.g. no budget). Once identified, try to find solutions and go through the methods. Time yourself as to how long each method takes. Schedule another time soon and go through the process again, once again timing yourself. This should help you establish a time budget that you can use to regularly schedule organizational tasks.

2. Take an inventory of organizing mechanisms at work/school. See if you can brainstorm any more. Use one page for each environment, and see if you have tools in one that can be used in both!

Resources:

• FAQ of an Office Organizer. OverHall Consulting. Access date 25 Jan. 06. You can learn a ton about organizing just by going through this web site.
• Greiner, Tony. “Collection Development and Shelf Space: A proposal for nonfiction collections.” Public Libraries 44 (November/December 2005): p.347-350. This article takes a scientific approach to determining shelf space allocations based on classification circulation. It’s a structured approach to eliminating shelf clutter.

Clutter is the ally of ignorance. It hides answers from questions while ignorance watches, laughing. Clutter and litter in a library are signs of disorder in the environment, not the message you want the public to receive!

The next resolution deals with another type of clutter. Noise.

-Ed Rossman, Interim Branch Manager for the Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library and author of Castles Against Ignorance: How to Make Libraries Great Educational Environments

Click here to access an archive of Ed’s webinar and a PDF of the slides he used.