Series
The Archive Series
Keeping things, and deciding what not to keep: how a library turns a subject into a shelf position, why destroying records on schedule is a legal act rather than carelessness, what a museum commits to when it accessions an object, and how digital formats outlive the software that can read them. Part of Under the Hood.
How Does a Library Decide Where a Book Goes?
A book is about several things at once. A shelf gives it one position in a single line. Library classification is the machinery for collapsing the first into the second, and almost everything strange about it follows from that collapse: why the catalogue carries retrieval while the shelf carries browsing, why a scheme preserves the worldview of whoever wrote it, and why revising one means moving the stock.
Coming soon