01 What this is about

How do we manage our acquisitions of books, papers, magazines, tapes, CDs and other things we just can't bring ourselves to give away? These are the things that in a way define our life experience, our travel through the world. They've kept us company through happy days and sad, through exciting times and dull periods. But left to themselves, they become almost useless as they are all jumbled up, they get tucked away in dusty corners and tattered cardboard boxes in the basement, and they introduce health-threatening clutter and disorder.

This question may not loom very large at the beginning of our acqisitorial lives, but a few years down the line, a few shifts of residence, and the issue of keeping, storing, and retrieving them at our will and convenience, becomes important.

My own response was to take the bull by the horns, grasp the nettle, and organize my books and music using recognized classification schemes like the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), although there are other... especially the one I started with, the Universal Decimal scheme (UDC), and for Forestry (my profession), a modification of it called the Oxford (ODC). Let me share my experiences in the hope that it may be of some help to some blighted soul groaning under the weight of all that rubbish.... but organized even imperfectly, can be enjoyed and used by self and others...