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...

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,…