Which Library School Project Shall I Choose?

All right, let’s talk a moment about my Information Organization Project for this quarter. I need your advice! The main assignment seems to be the cataloging and organization of some kind of a collection. The basic requirement is that it has to be a fairly large collection – there should potentially be about 1000 pieces that can be organized. Now, I have wracked my brain and come up with the following three possibilities.

My stepdad has a quite comprehensive, yet disorganized collection of 1000s of books on poetry. They are in all different styles, authors, and genres from English to Irish to Indian to Chinese. These could certainly be cataloged in a variety of ways, at many levels of, as the librarians say, “granularity.” I could catalog them by country, by verse style, by author, by genre – the possibilities are endless. This collection would be almost the perfect “echt” library school project, as it consists of books of various types and themes, and I can’t imagine that it would not be approved by the Professor. In addition, the opportunity to bring order to my stepdad’s incredibly chaotic collection is somehow appealing. On the downside, though, I am not actually a huge fan of poetry. But on the other other hand, I don’t think a librarian HAS to be a huge fan of the material he is overseeing, right?

So, for a moment, let’s assume that I don’t choose the poetry books as my collection. If you were to open my poor closet, you would, I am ashamed to say, find a gigantic pile of newspapers. 20 years worth of newspapers! Now, I am NOT an obsessive compulsive packrat, like the sort you see on that TV show “Hoarders,” but each one of those papers has a review by me in it. Some have two or three. Wouldn’t it be a nice thing to wade into those newspapers and catalog all my reviews? I could catalog them by newspaper, as well as by title, genre, theater company, or many other ways. It would make quite a collection, and that’s a fact. On the upside, I know a lot about the theater and it would be rather chuffing to organize my own reviews (or at least a fraction of them). On the downside, I wonder if I could get the project approved by the instructor – and, after that, can you imagine the filthy ink on my hands? And how messy the scraps of paper would make my apartment? The cats would also probably urinate all over the newspapers, I daresay.

Alternatively, but in a related vein, I have at least a thousand actual theater programs stowed in the OTHER closet. And I must confess that I have an archival interest in actually going through them and putting them in some order. I mean, the programs date back from the production of AMADEUS I saw in London in 1983, to the revolting thing I reviewed at the Complex last weekend. It would be quite the walk down memory lane to go through the programs and put them in order as to theater, year, genre – well, who knows how else?

Anyway, so there you have it. Three possibilities for my IOP project! But which one shall I choose? I must confess that I really do not know at this point. I am sort of leaning towards the poetry books – but why not the play programs? It’s so hard to pick. What is YOUR advice?