IsisInBlog

Reinventing Knowledge: The Medieval Controversy of Alphabetical Order

In their Reinventing Knowledge chapter on monasteries and convents, Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton mention findability techniques developed following the invention of the page, including alphabetical order (p. 91).  David Weinberger, in Everything Is Miscellaneous, also discusses the development of alphabetical order in the Middle Ages.  He points out that it took a long time to catch on because, in his opinion, it was “conceptually confusing.”  To prove his point about confusion, he quotes alphabetizing instructions from 1286, which apart from the funny spelling, are actually quite clear (pp. 26-27).  Weinberger is correct, however, that alphabetical order took centuries to be accepted, but he is wrong about the reason.  It was not too confusing, it was too easy. 

According to Mary and Richard Rouse in their article “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page,”* the alphabet is an artificial method of ordering as opposed to a rational method.  This distinction can be seen in glosses, reference works that explained details of the Bible without biblical interpretation.  These glosses eventually evolved into glossaries.  Information in early glosses appeared in the same order that it appeared in the Bible or other religious books.  This is called a rational order.  Even indexes were arranged in the same order as the book being indexed.  To find something, you had to already know what page it was on.  Rouse & Rouse indicate these early finding devices were meant to reflect the concept that the “universe is a harmonious whole” (p. 202).  So the primary concern of arrangement was to promote philosophy not to find information.

That changed when authors of religious books needed streamlined access to information.  As preachers, they started alphabetizing material called distinction collections to help them prepare weekly, or in 1200 perhaps daily, sermons.    Alphabetical order is an artificial method because it has no purpose other than to arrange information.  It does not reflect how the book is organized.  It does not reflect a philosophical theory.  It just puts material into a simple, easy to understand structure.  The preachers apologized for using alphabetical order, but they went ahead and developed the method because they needed to find information fast. 

            The controversy over alphabetical order continues today.  An information architecture discussion list recently had a lively exchange about popularity ranking vs. the alphabet.  One person preferred popularity because it was felt that alphabetical order is essentially random.  The respondent here was confusing an artificial arrangement with a complete lack of order.  More interesting, however, is the assumption that a rational order with unknown values, such as popularity, is preferable to an artificial order with known values, such as the alphabet.  We pretty much all know the alphabet, but if you look at a list of items arranged by popularity, you can only guess at individual placement.

Function determines the form of an arrangement.  Popularity and the alphabet serve different functions.  There are many situations where popularity is the most valuable organizing choice.  But if you just want to display information for fast location, those preachers in the Middle Ages developed a very easy method.     

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* The Rouse and Rouse article is available as a chapter in their book Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (1991) and in the conference proceedings Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., 1982). 

Reinventing Knowledge: Early Information Architecture in the Page of a Book

After the page was invented as a findability fix for scrolls, medieval scribes started working on its information architecture.  To learn more about the history of the page, I followed a citation in Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, to the article by Mary and Richard Rouse “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page.” *        

Pages in a book allowed readers to open to a specific passage, rather than having to scan while unrolling a scroll.  Pages also allowed the simple finding device of a table of contents.   Rouse and Rouse indicate that “virtually every twelfth- to fourteenth-century aid to study that has a prologue” (p. 197) includes material about ease of use with such phrases as “statim invenire” which means to find instantly.  That’s three centuries of bragging about findability. 

Once they discovered findability, monks and nuns who spent their entire existence praying and copying texts, began looking at the page itself as an opportunity for improvement.  Some of their innovations included clearly delineated paragraphs and early quotation marks know as puncti, two dots (..) above the first word of the quote and a colon (:) above the last word.  They wrote chapter headings in different colors and included running headlines, now known as headers and footers.  They placed citations to the side of pertinent text, later moved to the bottom of the page and called footnotes.

These are standards we use today in print publishing.  As Web pages developed in recent decades, new standards evolved.  For example, most Web pages include navigation methods, frequently a line of buttons at the top or the side of the page.  Copyright statements are often at the bottom of the page in small letters.  While there are books about design standards, there are no laws that say a Webpage must be arranged in this way, but most of them are.  As in the Middle Ages, these standardized protocols became established through practitioners’ development and use.

There is one significant difference.  In the Middle Ages, information architects were confined to small groups working in monasteries and convents.  Later, book production fell to publishers, still a small group.  Today, anyone can design and publish a Webpage, thus the group that collectively agrees on standards is much larger.  Many of its members are volunteers.  There are no rules and anyone can veer from standardization.  We are less surprised to see a Web page without navigation buttons than a published book without a title page.  

            Voluntary standardization is the collectivism promoted by many who see the Web as a unique reinvention of knowledge.  But it seems to be a matter of scale.  The monks and nuns invented information architecture and spent several centuries working out the details of the page.  When the Internet community began building Web pages, they spent several years working out the details of our current standard practices.    

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* The Rouse and Rouse article is available as a chapter in their book Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (1991), which I used, and in the conference proceedings Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., 1982) 

Reinventing Knowledge, Inventing Findability

             Knowledge communication began to change from speech to text in the 3^rd Century BCE.  Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton define this as the first reinvention of knowledge in their book, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. Controversy accompanies any major change and the controversy over speech vs. text continued for centuries, perhaps continuing today.   

The argument in favor of speech grows from the reputation of the speaker.  When someone talks to you, you are likely to know that person and can rate reliability.  Written words, however, may emanate from a geographically distant author with an unknown reputation.  While many place high value on the published word, others may be inclined to give more credence to the opinions of friends, even if those friends are virtual with reliability gauged by reputation management systems on social networking sites.   

In the ancient world, textual material had other advantages beyond reputation, as explained by Cassiodorus, a Roman official in the 5^th and 6^th Centuries CE, “even if our memory retains the content, it alters the words; but there [on paper] discourse is stored in safety, to be heard for ever with consistency” (Encyclopaedia Romana).  Two millennia later, we find ourselves returning to conversational discourse with an online record that can be heard forever with consistency, or at least as long as the Website remains active.    

Cassiodorus eventually founded a monastery where he participated in the second reinvention of knowledge.  As Rome disintegrated, monks and nuns retreated into their cloisters, took vows of silence, and started copying texts.   Monasteries and convents became the repositories of knowledge with religious scribes silently copying words, thus cementing text over speech as the medium for knowledge exchange.

Books started out as scrolls, which themselves were a technological improvement over bark tablets.  Here’s Cassiodorus writing about the olden days, “For how could you quickly record words which the resistant hardness of bark made it almost impossible to set down?  No wonder that the heat of the mind suffered pointless delays, and genius was forced to cool as its words were retarded” (Encyclopaedia Romana).  That’s exactly the improvement I find with computers over typewriters. 

Like anyone who spends a lot of time with written texts, the monks and nuns started thinking about findability.  Paper scrolls, faster for writing, had a serious problem.  To get to any point in the middle, you had to keep unrolling until you found the right passage.  Books, the 2^nd Century’s latest technology, solved that with individual pages (not to mention the cost savings of writing on both sides).  Now instead of unrolling, you could just turn to a specific page.  The word for these early books is codex.  Kind of has a technological ring to it.  McNeely and Wolverton compare the change to “the difference between a videotape and a DVD.” 

(For an overview of findability in the 21^st Century, see the AIIM report Findability: The Art and Science of Making Content Easy to Find by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen of Information Architected.)

Reinventing Knowledge in Times of Change

Currently reading Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton.  I am interested in claims of knowledge reinvention during times of upheaval.  In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger promotes our time of the World Wide Web as reinventing knowledge.  Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen and photosynthesis, also promoted his time of the American and French Revolutions as reinventing knowledge. 

Eras of massive change, such as Priestley’s and our own, encourage us to believe that our time on earth is the most important in all of history, so important that even knowledge is transformed.  In their book, McNeeley and Wolverton look at actual changes in knowledge, primarily through the institutions that promoted them.

First up is the library at Alexandria.  The change here is from the spoken word to the written word.  That’s a huge change in knowledge.  Writing and books existed before the library’s founding in 300 BCE, but only as an adjunct to the spoken word.  Because authors dictated their words to scribes, writing was a service, not a scholarly activity.  The speaker, not the writer, was honored.  That changed when the Alexandrian library began collecting scrolls and providing scholars with convivial living arrangements. 

During the transition from speech to text, there was much argument about the value of written ideas as opposed to spoken ideas.  Socrates preferred the spoken word which he felt was more truthful.  You could gauge the veracity of ideas by the reputation of the speaker.  In contrast, the written word was separate from the author and there was no way, at least in Ancient Greece, of judging the reputation of the writer. 

According to McNeeley and Wolverton, the oral versus written argument continued through the 18^th Century.  It continues today with two forms of research – reading about ideas and talking about ideas with colleagues.  If you want the latest information, do you reach for a database or a telephone?  Do you feel more comfortable with a distant author or someone whose reputation you already know?

Social interaction on the Web may be another continuation of the argument.  Are social sites the digital equivalence of oral rhetoric?  Web connectivity encourages the free exchange of ideas, like a spoken discussion with a much bigger conversational group.  The medium is written, but speed encourages spontaneous interaction.  Many sites have reputation systems to help users gauge the veracity of other users.  One might suggest the quality of discourse on today’s social sites is far below that of the ancient Greeks, but remember they didn’t write everything down.      

All Things Being Equal: Sorting Articles in One Issue of a Journal

My university and public libraries both offer the E-Journal Portal service.  Enter the name of a journal and the portal shows which databases deliver full-text articles in that journal.  Each database responds to this type of search with its own display personality. The differences in their presentations have implications for intellectual honesty that demonstrate once again the necessity of organizing information with an understanding of subject parameters.      

ProQuest does this type of search best by offering a journal title drilldown, which first presents a journal page with available issues listed in reverse chronological order. Clicking a date retrieves all articles in a single issue.  Two sorting options are offered.  The default is alphabetical by article title.  A page number sort replicates the table of contents.  ProQuest’s search screen provides a different user experience.  That list of retrieved titles sorts by “most recent first” (default) or by relevance.  In the journal title drilldown, those two sorts have no value because all articles have the same date and equal relevance.  Thus ProQuest provides different sorting capabilities for the two techniques.

            Gale’s Academic OneFILE offers journal title drilldown with no sorting capabilities.  It opens with the journal page and a list of available years.  Each year expands to display its issues in reverse chronological order.  The resulting titles display in page number order, but that is not the indicated sort.  The only listed sort option is publication date, which is actually the search criterion.  With the search screen technique, relevance is added to date as a sort option.  By eliminating the relevance sort from journal title drilldown, Academic OneFile acknowledges that relevance has no value for a list of titles from a single issue, but it offers no realistic sort capabilities.  Instead results are delivered pre-sorted by page number, with the sort indicated as publication date.           

EBSCO’s journal title drilldown is similar to Academic OneFile with the first page offering a list of years that expands into issues in reverse chronological order.  However in its sorting options, EBSCO acknowledges no difference between the journal title drilldown and search screen techniques.  Its Business Source Elite and MasterFILE Premier both allow sorting by date, source and relevance for results retrieved with journal title drilldown or from the search screen.  All three sorts are useless in a list of titles from the same issue of the same journal.  Selecting any of these sorts in journal title drilldown returns a list of titles in page number order, which like Academic OneFile, is not offered as a sort option.  Business Source Elite at the academic library offers a fourth option, a valuable author sort, but the public library’s MasterFILE Premier eliminates that advantage.

OCLC’s WilsonSelectPlus does not offer journal title drilldown.  Users of E-Journal Portal are simply taken to an empty search screen.  Those who want the drilldown must try a different database.  If they stick with WilsonSelectPlus, they are rewarded with advanced sorting capabilities, but not with a one-click list of articles in a single issue. 

Both ProQuest and WilsonSelectPlus maintain their intellectual honesty in the entire process.  ProQuest offers a separate journal title drilldown with distinct sort capabilities, thus recognizing that these results have different organizational parameters than the results from a search screen.  WilsonSelectPlus does not offer journal title drilldown.  While that is disappointing, the database is honest about its capabilities.  Academic OneFile is halfway there.  It does not offer relevance sorting for a list of titles from the same issue, instead it labels a page number sort as date.  EBSCO recognizes no difference between results obtained by journal title drill down and the search screen, providing a surreal user experience as the three sorting mechanisms of date, source and relevance all return titles in page number order.        

“Beyond Findability” Published in Searcher

My latest print article, “Beyond Findability: Organizing Information in the Age of the Miscellaneous,” is now available in the February 2009 issue of Searcher. 

In addition to discussing logic discrepancies in David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous, the article addresses the value of arranged information for reasons other than findability.  The organizing process itself often leads to new knowledge.  Like any form of communication, organized information expresses a knowledge perspective.  The presentation of that perspective can be a valuable service to users.  Physical arrangements of organized information are often symmetrical, perhaps neurologically enhancing knowledge acquisition.  The article opens with a description of Michael Wesch’s video, Information R/evolution,” which implies that libraries still use typewriters.

Subsequent to publishing the article, I discovered I am not the only one thinking “Beyond Findability.”  On October 31, Jonathan Young published “Beyond Findability: The Search for Active Intelligence” on ZDNet News.  Young is a Senior Research Engineer at Attivio.  His article is about the future of search engines, “As we move beyond the search box (the ‘user interface of last resort’), enterprise search solutions are beginning to support many different search modalities, including exploratory search, information discovery, and information synthesis.”

On March 18, “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times” will be a pre-conference workshop at the ASIST Information Architecture Summit.  The workshop is sponsored by the Information Architecture Institute with co-presenters Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Joe Lamantia and Matthew Milan,.  They will be discussing the future of information architecture and user design, looking at “new, emerging ideas that have shown promise ‘in the wild’ of design practice.” 

Michael Wesch will be a keynote speaker at the Summit, so we’ve got a circle going here.  This year the Summit is at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, a great venue.  If you attend, be sure to check out the ducks.

Persuasion by Arrangement: Intended and Unintended Consequences

Arrangement persuades every day.  Lots of us pop into the grocery store for a bottle of milk.  So why is milk always at the back of the store?  That arrangement persuades us to hike through aisles of food that we only just now realize we need.  Got cookies?

The arrangement of concepts also persuades.  At the simplest level, alphabetical order implies equality and chronology implies time.  An intentional arrangement considers the needs of both user and designer to influence effective use of information.  An unintentional arrangement risks influencing users in unintended ways.

In his book Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, B. J. Fogg defines persuasion as “an attempt to change attitudes or behaviors or both” (p. 15).  By placing milk at the back of the store, the grocer attempts to influence buying behavior.  In the arrangement of concepts, I expand Fogg’s definition to include persuasion as reflecting a point of view.  If I use alphabetical order, I may persuade you that each item has equal value, at least in terms of the list.

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrates one of the most elegant examples of persuasive arrangement.  She organized names on The Wall by date of injury, not date of death.  A soldier who died later of wounds inflicted in battle is therefore listed on the date of the battle.  His name is in alphabetical order with others who died on that day, so he is included among his buddies.  The survivors of the battle can visit The Wall and, in one section, see the names of their comrades.  This intentional arrangement persuades survivors and tourists alike to consider the fellowship of fallen soldiers.  It is one reason The Wall inspires more emotion than other memorial structures.

Maya Lin likes circles, so her chronology begins with a tall center panel and proceeds to the right as the panels descend in height.  It begins again at the farthest left of the panels, which grow to the tallest center point and the final names.  The name at the farthest right is Jessie C. Alba.  The others who died on his day are at the farthest left.

This may be an example of an unintentional arrangement decision with unintended consequences.  A theme of The Wall is comradeship among those who died together and among their friends who survived.  Because it is primarily an intentional arrangement, it obeys its own rules. Each name follows the previous name.  Last names beginning with an A signal a new day.  It is this rule that places Jessie C. Alba at the farthest end.  The others on his day are at the opposite end of The Wall, separated by 138 panels.  This separation implies the loneliness of death, which is the antithesis of The Wall’s theme of comradeship.

In the design process, it would have been a simple adjustment to move Alba’s name one place over to the farthest left panel, with the others on his day.  We do not know if that was contemplated.  The Wall is a work of art.  Each detail allows us to ponder its meaning.  Dying on a battlefield is a lonely experience, even if you are surrounded by your comrades.  But that is the opposite message from the other details on the Wall, which purposefully gather together those who died and the visitors who survived.  Intentional or not, in this one detail for Jessie C. Alba, the rules were more important than the theme.

Native Americans place one error in their artwork because only God can be perfect.  It is an intended error with an intended consequence.  Arrangement errors that go unrecognized have unintended consequences, possibly negative consequences that may defeat mission goals until the error is discovered.  Information arrangement is part of an entire message.  Take as much care with its details as you would with any other communication.

Expanding the Metaphor

          The metaphor of digital natives and digital immigrants was originated by educator Marc Prensky (2001) to differentiate between students who were born into and grew up with the Internet and their teachers who encountered the Internet as adults.  The metaphor reflects immigrants who move to a new country, try to assimilate, but still speak with an accent.  Their children, born in the new country, are naturally assimilated and speak the language as their native tongue.  Prensky provides a few examples of this pre-Internet accent, such as printing emails before reading them (p. 2).  Most, if not all, of his accent examples seem more like getting familiar with new technology in 2001.  I don’t know of any digital immigrants who print emails, at least not since 1995.      

          There are other objections to this metaphor.  For one, it doesn’t address access to technology, which adds socio-economic status into the mix (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008, p. 778).  You can’t be a digital native if your family can’t afford to buy the digits.  David Weinberger (2007) offered another objection in a KMWorld column.  He doesn’t consider himself a digital immigrant because of his lengthy computing history and superior computing skills.  So he changed the metaphor from Ellis Island to post-Revolution America and defined himself as a digital settler – not born in the country, but an early and skilled resident. 

          I’d like to expand that metaphor a little further, with settlers preceded by explorers and pioneers.  Like Lewis and Clark, digital explorers forged their way into new territory, blazing trails of hardware and software.  Pioneers followed, finding new ways to use the technology.  Settlers liked what they saw and joined in.  They were followed this time by immigrants and their children, the digital natives. 

          This metaphor doesn’t take into account Native Americans who were already on the land when the European explorers arrived.  But in the digital frontier, the land was not already in existence, waiting to be stolen.  It was constructed by digital explorers and pioneers who sold their ideas to eager settlers, immigrants and eventual natives. 

References

Bennett, S., Maton, K., & Kervin, L.  (2008).  The ‘digital natives’ debate:  A Critical review of the evidence.  British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), 775-786.  Retrieved January 15, 2009, from First Search WilsonSelectPlus database.

Prensky, M.  (2001, October).  Digital natives, digital immigrants.  On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.  Retrieved January 5, 2009, from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing

Weinberger, D.  (2008, January).  Digital natives, immigrants and others.  KMWorld 17(1).  Retrieved January 15, 2009, from http://www.kmworld.com

Wikipedia as a Research Tool

Frank Luntz, the conservative pollster who coined the phrase “death tax” to replace “estate tax,” cites Wikipedia frequently in his book Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.  An odd reference choice, since one rarely sees citations for encyclopedia entries.  Wikipedia has the additional drawbacks of being entirely written by users, with unsigned articles that can be changed by anyone at any time. 

He cites Wikipedia as the source for a quote from Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 anti-Goldwater “Daisy” commercial (pp. 123, 300).   Wikipedia currently provides a link to the original 30 second ad.  Of course these entries change all the time, but according to the Internet archive Wayback Machine, the link first appeared three years before Luntz published his book.  For an investment of 30 seconds, he could have cited the primary source.  But he didn’t bother with that.  Instead he relied on an encyclopedia that can be modified by anyone on the Internet.       

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia.  It’s always my first step when embarking on a new research project.  With a few caveats, I have convinced friends and colleagues that it is reliable.  Because author groups tend to form around one knowledge area, the entries are usually accurate and usually meet the Wikipedia standard of NPOV (no point of view). 

Anyone can write a Wikipedia entry, so it has lots of information about obscure topics.  I recently looked up a major rock band, the Doobie Brothers, which led me to their producer Ted Templeman and then to his 1960’s band Harpers Bizarre, who had covered a song by Cole Porter.  In a print encyclopedia, I would have to look up each item in its respective volume.  In Wikipedia, the links do the looking up for me. 

Of course, in a traditional encyclopedia, and in the online Encyclopedia Britannica which requires a subscription, only Cole Porter has his own article.  The Doobie Brothers and Ted Templeman are both mentioned in an entry about Warner/Reprise Records.  A search for Harpers Bizarre only returns an article about Diana Vreeland, fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, the magazine whose name the band parodied.  In Wikipedia, even “Anything Goes,” the title song from Porter’s 1930’s musical, has its own separate entry.  Harpers Bizarre covered it in 1967.  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.”  Fit right in with the Haight Ashbury scene.   

This depth of information is achieved because someone out there knows a lot about Harpers Bizarre.  Wikipedia gives that person, and anyone else with a knowledge niche, a forum to anonymously write about their favorite topic.  If a group forms around that knowledge area, refining and evolving the article, accuracy is achieved, along with the Wikipedia gold standard of NPOV, because the group moderates itself. 

For this reason, the accuracy level tends to be about the same as traditional encyclopedias.  This was tested in 2005, when Nature magazine found that the average Wikipedia science article contained four errors, while the average Britannica science article contained three (“Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head,” 12/15/05, pp. 900-901).  Wikipedia has the advantage here because it can correct errors immediately and the hard copy Britannica has to wait for the next printing. 

But Wikipedia’s strength is also its weakness.  It remains an intellectual graffiti wall where errors linger until someone bothers to paint them over.  Accuracy and NPOV are achieved through the group.  Highly visible topics more readily meet the standard than less popular topics.  If someone writes an inaccurate article and no one reads it or bothers to change it, then the errors stand.  In 2005, prior to the Nature study, a jokester modified journalist John Siegenthaler’s Wikipedia biography to imply that he participated in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  Sieganthaler, a pallbearer at Kennedy’s funeral, discovered the error four months after it appeared.

I found an error myself this year while researching the French Revolution.  One Wikipedia article stated that Marie Antoinette’s brother was a pope.  Her brother Leopold II was the Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of a lot of Germanic territories and a major player in the wars of the French Revolution, but, despite the title, not a pope.  I assume the error was quickly corrected, but it was there when I happened to be reading.  If I had been new to the topic, perhaps a 7^th grader, I might have believed it. (Sorry, no links.  This is a memory I hadn’t expected to use in an article.) 

As a reader, you do not know if a Wikipedia fact has been modified by a confused researcher or by someone just having a little fun.  Of course you can look at the editorial conversations that are generally available to all, but it would be impossible to vet every single fact.  So I don’t rely on Wikipedia for accuracy and I have not yet used it as a reference, although I do frequently link to it in these blog postings to provide more information. 

And now here’s the real reason I like Wikipedia – lots and lots of footnotes, references and links to more information – much more than a print encyclopedia because Wikipedia is not constrained by space.  Also it needs to prove its accuracy, so it places a high premium on documentation.  I knew a link to the original “Daisy” ad would be on that Wikipedia page, because that’s how Wikipedia operates.  If it can point you to the primary source, it will do so. 

I use Wikipedia the way you’re supposed to use any encyclopedia, as a starting point.  It gives me an overview that is more likely than not to be accurate and it gives me lots of resources for more information.  Those resources are signed and they have more references and it was Wikipedia that got me set for a new knowledge hunt.

Stealth Organizing

With evacuees arriving at the Phoenix airport, a local radio station announced Katrina Donation Day.  I was looking for a way to help and it was easy enough to pack a box of clothes for the New Orleans refugees.  To give a little extra, I joined the bucket brigade in the station parking lot and helped load the truck – lots of clothing, also toys, baby stuff, toiletries, hygiene items.  The hygiene woke me up, a box filled with necessities that have been in my bathroom cabinet since childhood.  That’s when I realized the enormity of losing everything and I knew I could make a difference in the rescue.      

 

I’m an organizer.  I usually organize ideas, but I can organize stuff.  The hurricane rescue effort in Phoenix was receiving massive amounts of donated items.  They could probably use some organizing expertise.  I started phoning the next day and was put on waiting lists.  To be effective, I had to get started soon.  Organizing initiatives work best when they happen at the beginning of a project.  So I kept calling.  Eventually someone understood the value of my offer.  At Salvation Army headquarters, they gave me a badge and sent me to evacuee housing.  It was now Monday afternoon, Labor Day, 2005.

 

The strategy was for evacuees to tell caseworkers what clothing they needed.  The caseworkers then searched for the right sizes in a free store arranged like a thrift store, with clothing divided by major categories, but not by size.  When I arrived, volunteers were emptying large warehouse boxes and hanging clothes on sales racks.  I positioned myself in their area for a full view of the entire operation and started sorting.  One of the volunteers, The Boss, came over to give me instructions, which I followed as I continued to survey the situation.

 

One key to a successful organizing project is finding a component with high return on investment (ROI).  The investment is the organizing expense, in this case, time and energy.  For my purposes, hanging up clothes had a low ROI because inconsistent size labeling forced a careful examination of each item.  The clothing in these categories was also few enough to be eyeballed by a caseworker.  I started looking for a fast win, an easy to organize section where caseworker frustration was high.  They were pawing through jumbled heaps of underwear and mounds of shoes trying to find sizes.  Underwear would be a huge project, but at least it was divided by sex.  Not so for shoes, which was also a more manageable quantity.  That’s where I started, working into the evening dividing shoes by sex and size.

 

The next morning I established authority by arriving early with supplies from home – blank paper, marking pens and tape.  The first task was labeling the now organized shoes.  When The Boss showed up around mid-morning and saw me already there, she knew I wouldn’t be following her instructions anymore.  About the time I finished the shoes, a large shipment of khaki pants arrived, neatly folded and stapled with conforming labels.  Big ROI there.  Evacuees were requesting work clothes for job interviews.  I located some unused tables, set up a staging area, and sorted pants like a deck of cards.  The thrift store was now beginning to feel like a shopping mall jeans store. Caseworkers just walked up to the correct size and took what they needed.

 

Returning from a break, I found my staging area commandeered for a thrift store category.  The Boss gave me a significant look, but she had not undone the organized khakis.  I wasn’t there for territorial skirmishes, so I walked over to the intimidating pile of women’s underwear.  Caseworkers, getting accustomed to efficiency, were complaining about sizes.  The first sort separated panties from socks.  That required finding empty boxes, refilling the boxes, and maneuvering them within a small space.  By the time everything was prepped, it was already evening.  Size sorting would begin tomorrow.

 

I arrived early again, but this day The Boss didn’t show and the organizing effort really got established.  After taping size labels to the wall, I began sorting the women’s underwear.  I got into the zone, the organizing zone.  It took all day, with caseworkers searching the collection as I worked.  At one point, I turned around and saw a guy organizing the men’s underwear.  About an hour later a group of new volunteers came up to me and asked what they could do to help.  I showed them the women’s socks.  When I finished the panties in the late afternoon, I took another visual survey.  All volunteers were organizing.  Caseworkers were finding what they needed without assistance.  Size labels on the wall displayed the organized nature of this facility.  In two and a half days, I turned a thrift store into a distribution center.  I did it without disrupting the rescue effort or even requesting assistance.