English language and literature overview

Solving a Problem

While working for a small company that published books and magazines about assembling model airplanes, I was part of a small group who wrote instructions. Most of the job entailed research about paints, glues, and plastics. Over time, we began collecting sources about all kinds of things which we could look up if we ever had questions pertaining to what we were writing about at the time. Also, because we were writers, we had various books on grammar, punctuation, and style that we used for reference as well.

This collection of sources consisted of magazines, books, articles, and tests we had conducted. Each writer had a small collection they kept in their office. As time went on, other people in the company would come to us asking if we knew about a particular kind of glue, paint, or some other thing that was related to putting the models together. We were becoming popular for this assorted collection of resources and one day we realized if we put all of our sources together, we might have the start of a pretty good mini library.

We were in agreement that we did need a central location for our references, as well as a system for borrowing or sources for others outside our department.

In our spare time, we cleaned out a corner and rescued an old bookshelf that someone else has tossed away. We compiled all of our sources and very quickly filled the bookshelf.

In the beginning, our system of borrowing operated on the "merit system." Anyone who wanted to borrow a book or magazine simply put their name on a sheet of paper. That worked well in the beginning - as not many people outside our department borrowed items. But eventually, that began to change and as our collection grew, the numbers of borrowers did, too. We keep adding books and magazines until one day we realized we had five bookshelves of source material. We were suddenly faced with an inventory problem and a situation that could spin out of control, should we allow it.

To add to the problem, some sources would appear to be lost, never to be seen again. With no way to track the missing sources, there was no way to recover them. We knew we had to come up with a way to keep track of our "library."

We decided the best way to do this was to enter the sources into our current data base program. Every day at lunch for several weeks, each writer would take a stack of sources and enter them into the data base. We included the name of the source and what type of information was in the source. This was tedious, but it was worth it when we realized we had over 800 sources in the data base. Entering each source into the data base automatically gave the source an identification number so at least we knew what we had in the library.

This did not solve the problem of sources wandering away, but it was very helpful when we would wonder if we had a particular source on, say, the best type of glue to use on a model which has already been painted. We didn't have to guess because we could look it up in the data base. This saved time searching through stacks of sources and since everyone had their own computer with access to the data base, it saved having to interrupt someone else.

This proved to be very successful and we entered new sources into the data base as we acquired them. The "library" was so successful that it outgrew the corner we had cleaned out for it. After several attempts, we were able to convince our supervisor to let us have one wall of the department for the bookshelves. This not only provided more room for the library, but it also allowed us to see who might be interested in borrowing a source.

Over several months, the library was visited by almost everyone in the company and became recognized as an important part of the team. The library continued to grow at a fairly regular pace and one day our company manager needed a reference on metallic paint. He was lucky, as the data base said we had just the magazine he needed -- except it was missing from the library.