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ON..
EFFICIENCY
ORGANIZATION
and
MAGAZINES
Terry F. Ritter WA3BKC
8 108 Bandera Road
San Antonio TX 78288
Contrary to pop ular belief. the mo st
efficient method of organization is no
orga nizatio n whatsoe ver. In the case of a
personal magazine collecti on, if you could
remember the pre cise location of every
art icle you have accumulat ed, you wo uld
never waste tim e hunti ng for a particular
sche matic, or putting t he copy ba ck in its
" prop er place." Sin ce most of us do no t
have perfect memories, some ·organizatio n
is necessary to fin d the informati on we
need in the mess we accumu late . The
impor tan t thing to remember is: the more
organized (and complicated ) a system is,
th e less efficient it will be.
Indexes are remarkably inefficient
devices for using information . A typ ical
index assigns each article an ind ividual
position and locating file card . To use the
ind ex as efficiently as possible, one mu st
keep both the magazin es and the file cards
in order. Additionally, when one is intereste
d in information on a single topic,
th ere is generally a separate magazine to
find for each art icle, and a page to mark so
one can refer back to it. Man y of these
articles will be useless and the magazines
must all be replaced in orde r when the
project is complete, or if the library is to
be used again.
The me thod I use requires a minimum
of organizati on as well as the wholesal e
destru ct ion of the magazines in order to
separate the individual articles. For those
of us who enjoy collecting th e co mplete set
of magazines, this thought is like being
against apple pie, motherhood, and The
American Way . Nevertheless, information
y ou cannot fi nd is useless, so if yo u want
to keep your magazines int act , I suggest
yo u star t in on yo ur first thousand file
cards, while the rest read on .
A ll pages of each important article mu st
be removed from the magaz ine and stapled
together. Each article shou ld be marked on
the top of the first page with filing subject
(and magazine and date, if not printed in
the arti cle itself). All articles of the same
subject are pla ced in a manila file fold er
which is filed alphabeti cally according to
subject. The topics sho uld be carefully
chose n for their ideas , or underlying principles
rather than th eir English nam es. For
examp le, in one file labeled " mixers" I
40
73 MAG A Z IN E