Organization Monkey

if you’ve ever moved a household with a professional moving company you’ve been swept into a very specific organizational scheme.  it’s the job of the professional mover to keep track of your inventory as well as relocating objects from your old house to your new house.  the mover tracks objects with numbered, colored stickers as well as maps.  it’s your job to tell the movers where you want the objects to go, and they make notations to put them in the correct place.  i don’t know why this surprised me, but it works the same with library movers.

inserted here is a picture of a periodical box with the american anthropologist inside.  see the sticker on the box?  that’s both an inventory sticker as well as a locating sticker.  it’s purple, which means it is going to the second floor of the new library.  all the items going to the second floor are marked with purple stickers.  the number on the sticker means it goes in a particular place on the second floor, on a specific shelf even.

periodical marked with inventory sticker

when this periodical is brought over to the new library it will be placed on a shelf in a space reserved for it.  inserted here is a picture to show you where inventory item #5146 is to be placed.

the row where item #5146 will be placed

we figured out where specifically we wanted this periodical to go on the new shelf by making a shelf list prior to the move.  inserted here is a mockup of what the shelf will look like, title by title.  the blue titles mean that the spines of the periodicals will be laid in a different position, for spacing purposes.

shelf list

i’ll post a picture of the periodical, american anthropologist, in its new home once the move takes place.