Sorting

“ In both cases the manufacturer is the one to suffer, by increasing the expense of sorting, holding the green if he is to make a high grade product, and by waste from cracking and mashing of the over-ripe. ”

“ In the factory many refinements are necessary to make a commercial article which will attract the eye as well as satisfy the sense of taste. The usual dark colored, rough, home-made article will not command a sale over a grocer’s counter alongside of that made in a modern commercial kitchen. Here, sorting tables, washing machine, scalder, cyclone for pulping, steam-jacketed kettle, tanks with coils, or vacuum pan for cooking, finishing machine, bottle washing, and filling machine, are all necessary. ”

“ Yet wait until the end and you will see that the division has been made with mathematical accuracy—that the measure, the quality of the soil, the slope of the field, the distance from the village—everything in short has been taken into account, that the reckoning has been correctly done and, what is most important, that every one of those present who were interested in the division is certain of the correctness of the division or settlement. The cry, the noise, the racket do not subside until every one is satisfied and no doubter is left. ”

“ The fact is you cannot be sure of preserving the cuttings or slips, if very numerous; they are almost certain to get mixed or lost, or elude you somehow. My remedy is this. I now take cheap notepaper and write one entry only on each leaf. Having compiled my index thus from A to Z, I arrange my slips and manipulate them as I would a pack of cards, although shuffling only for the purpose of getting the arrangement of the letters right. Thus I save myself all the labour and trouble of pasting or laying down the slips in analytical order. ”

“ The totality of entities which lend themselves to a given type of order, form a collection, or an aggregate; and if the order of a given aggregate is to be unambiguous, the members of this aggregate must be uniquely determined, and must be mutually exclusive: they must be what we shall later denote by the term elements of the aggregate. Externality and ‘elementarity’ are only different consequences of the same relation, which we denote by the term extension, and which thus together with the relation of order, will constitute the basis of our definition of space and time. ”

“ Every work should have one index to the whole set, and not an index to each volume.
An index to each volume of a set is convenient if a general amalgamated index to the whole set is given as well; but a work with several indexes and no general one is most inconvenient and irritating, while to have both seems extravagant. If, however, the author or publisher is willing to present both, it is not for the user of the book to complain.
2. Indexes to be arranged in alphabetical order, proper names and subjects being united in one alphabet. ”

“ We want as little classification as possible in an alphabetical index. Mr. W. F. Poole wisely said in reference to the proposal of one of his helpers on the Index of Periodical Literature to place Wealth, Finance, and Population under the heading of Political Economy: "The fatal defect of every classified arrangement is that nobody understands it except the person who made it and he is often in doubt."
3. The entries to be arranged according to the order of the English alphabet. ”

“ As the number of titles under each heading increases in number so does the opportunity and need of division. The first and most usual groups to be made are Bibliography and its companion History, and the “practical-form” groups Dictionaries and Periodicals Under countries the first grouping will be Description and Travels, History and Politics, Language and Literature, followed by Natural history, etc. For examples of further subdivisions see the longer catalogues. It is not worth while in a printed catalogue to make very minute divisions. ”

“ SAPIENTIA. When numbers of any magnitude are set down in order. the first set down is called the "minor term" and the last the "major." When, in making a division, we say by how many the number is to be divided, we give the "divisor," but when we enumerate how many there are in each of the parts we set forth the"quotient." ”

“ But there are two sorts of 'listing.' There is the listing which is the yielding to the mob of ignoble passions and clamant desires of the animal nature within us, and there is the 'listing' which is obeying the impulses of a higher will, that has been blended with ours. ”

“ In the case of a small index there is little difficulty with material, for it can be arranged at once into first letters, and when the table is cleared of the slips these can be placed in the pages of an ordinary book to keep them distinct, and can then be sorted in perfect alphabet and pasted down. In the case of a large index it will be necessary to place the slips in a safer place. ”

“ Every printed production worthy of being called a book should have an index. Is the index the same as the table of contents? The table of contents is printed at the beginning of the volume. It is a synopsis, by chapter headings or more detailed topics, of the plan of the book. It gives a general outline of [131] the contents of the book. You are interested in public speaking. You wonder whether a book contains a chapter on debating. Does this one? You notice that a speaker used a series of jerky gesticulations. ”

“ This is an excellent example of the so-called 'fallacy of division,' or predicating what is true only of a collection, of each member of the collection distributively. It no more follows that if a thousand things together cause sensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it follows that if one pound weight moves a balance, then one ounce weight must move it too, in less degree. ”

“ Indeed, there is a set of collectors, the shelves of whose libraries are always made proportionably stout, and placed at a due distance from each other, in order that they may not break down beneath the weight of such ponderous volumes. ”

“ We have a staff of about a thousand sorters, assistant sorters, and boy-sorters in this (Inland) office alone, who have been, or are being, carefully trained for the work. Some are smart, and some of course are slow. They are tested occasionally. When a sorter is tested he is given a pack of five hundred cards—dummies—to represent letters. A good man will sort these in thirteen or fifteen minutes. There are always sure to be a few mis-sorts, even in our well-regulated family—that is, letters sorted to the wrong sections or divisions. ”

“ We commence our present division—and shall follow the like course with the others—with its higher forms, and, proceeding in descending order, shall in each conclude with those humble rudimentary forms in which the rigid divisions of classification are obliterated, and the only differences which can be assigned are, at best, but little more than arbitrary. ”

“ There is the index which is always growing; and (2) there is the index that is made at one time, and is printed immediately it is ready for the press. The same course of procedure will not be suitable for both these classes.
[pg 174] 1. Indexes to commonplace books belong to this category. It has been usual here to leave a few pages blank for the index, and to arrange the entries in strict alphabetical order under the first letters and then under the first vowel following a consonant, or the second, when the initial is a vowel. ”

“ Thus, by taking a little trouble, the historian can apply one constant measure to his judgments of increase and decrease, as he reviews social changes. He must subdivide his community into enumeration units, and against each unit, at each convenient date, he must enter a record of his judgment that the trait, activity, interest, or relation under investigation can be predicated of a large or of only a small majority, of a large or of only a small minority, of the individuals composing the enumeration unit. ”

“ When they become very numerous, in any system of classification, the system breaks down by its own weight. Library attendants consume an undue amount of time in learning it, and library cataloguers and classifiers in affixing the requisite signs of designation to the labels, the shelves, and the catalogues. ”

“ I count, but I count, in ordinary life, what I take to be real objects, existent quite apart from my counting. Suppose that I count ships seen from the shore. There, says common sense, are the ships, sailing by themselves, and quite indifferent to whether anybody counts them or not. In advance of the counting, the ships, in so far as they are a real collection, have their number. ”

“ We therefore put marks upon the simple sensations or upon the 'clusters.' We ticket them as a tradesman tickets bundles of goods in his warehouse, and can refer to them for our own purposes or those of others. As the number of objects to be marked is enormous, as there are countless ideas and clusters and clusters of clusters of endless variety to be arranged in various ways, one main object of naming is economy. A single word has to be used to mark a great number of individuals. ”

“ In the eighth chapter of How to Catalogue a Library there are a series of rules for making a catalogue of a small library in which are codified the different points which had been discussed in the previous chapters. In the present chapter the Index Society rules are printed in italic, and to them are now added some illustrative remarks. There is necessarily a certain likeness between rules for indexing and rules for cataloguing, but the differences are perhaps more marked. At all events, the rules for one class of work will not always be suitable for the other class.
[pg 134]
1. ”

“ Parts of and places in countries are arranged alphabetically under each, and are marked either by the usual Cutter order-table, which has initial letters followed by figures, or by a special Cutter order-table composed of figures alone. ”

“ Every new quality or circumstance which can belong to an object, subdivides each combination or class, so that the number of such combinations, when unrestricted by logical conditions, is represented by an infinitely high power of two. The extremely rapid increase in the number of subdivisions obliges us to confine our attention to a few qualities at a time. ”

“ Poole. In an article on "The [pg 60] Indexing of Periodicals" in the Index to the Periodical Literature of the World for 1892, she gives a remarkable series of instances of absurd entries. Some of these are due to the vicious habit of trying to save trouble by cutting up the lists of contents, and repeating the entries under different headings. Miss Hetherington's examples are well worth repeating; but as bad indexing is the rule, it is scarcely worth while to gibbet any one magazine, as most of them are equally bad. ”

“ The labour and patience, the judgment and penetration which are required to make a good index is only known to those who have gone through this most painful, but least praised part of a publication. But laborious as it is, I think it is indispensably necessary to manifest the treasures of any multifarious collection, facilitate the knowledge to those who seek it, and invite them to make application thereof. ”

“ The more modern labours of the Ordnance Survey are too familiar to render any notice of them here necessary, if it were not wholly out of place to speak of them in detail, and the time is, perhaps, not come for doing so with advantage. ”

“ The great value of the measurement lies in the fact that it gives us the means of a comprehensive description of the varieties contained in a geographic or social group. A table that informs us of the frequency of various forms as expressed by measurements that occur in a group, gives us a comprehensive view of the variability of the group that we are studying. ”

“ The subdivision of books into chapters, each with a more or less emphatic full close in its own key, is found to be a help as giving the attention halting places by the way. Everything that is worth attending to fatigues as well as delights, much as the climbing of a mountain does so. ”

“ I have formed, so far as I know, but one dogmatic conviction, and it is this: that the best catalogue which the art of man can invent is a catalogue in two inter-dependent yet independent parts; the first and greater part an [pg 131] alphabetical catalogue of authors, the second and lesser part a subject-index. ”

“ HOW TO ORDER—The style in the series to order is determined by the client's centre front below measurement; but when there is more than one style in the series with the correct centre front below measurement, choose the one which has also the back below measurement nearest to the client's needs. ”

“ Some relief is obtained from its burthen, if we in our turn make the men of our own generation debtors to us. The plan on which my Index is made, will I trust be found convenient. By the alphabetical arrangement in the separate entries of each article the reader, I venture to think, will be greatly facilitated in his researches. Certain subjects I have thought it best to form into groups. [pg 107] Under America, France, Ireland, London, Oxford, Paris and Scotland, are gathered together almost all the references to those subjects. ”

“ These facts, these unquestionable facts, while they beautifully illustrate the existence of circles in the grand primary distribution of nature, point quite as decidedly to another conclusion, which it is my aim also to establish—that there is a tendency universally developed, in a greater or less degree, in all minor or less important circles to arrange themselves round major or more important ones. ”

“ I've always hated division—particularly division of apples and peaches. There is no meaner sum in any arithmetic in the world [98] than that I used to have to do every time I got an apple when I was your age."
"What was the sum?" asked Jimmieboy. ”