Arranging a Document Collection

Students, researchers and engineers often collect reprints, photocopies, notes etc. about projects. When this collection grows to a size of say a hundred documents, it is often difficult to handle the material. When choosing a method for the arrangement of your material it is useful to consider the following factors:

• the volume and rate of growth of the material;
• available resources - equipment, computer storage;
• retrieval possibilities - author, title, subject, chronological sequence, combination of several headings.

The material can be arranged:

• alphabetically under names of authors;
• numerically according to accession number (accession = when acquired);
• under subject headings, which can be arranged systematically or alphabetically. The choice of a suitable systematic arrangement for subject headings requires care and takes time. If there are relatively few documents, and these can be conveniently grouped under a few headings, then a simple storage system can work very well. If you are handling a larger quantity of documents, or if you are arranging documents under accession numbers, then you will need some kind of index or register, in order to find the documents quickly.

Back to Contents