Okay, sometimes when one needs to get from here to there, one needs to utilise a Yellow Submarine. Hey, it worked for The Beatles! And to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, "I'm not here to talk about The Beatles". However, as the song starts out, "One, two, three, four," I'd like to use it as my introduction to today's talk about Data. And Normalisation (sort of... I suppose that Standardisation is more appropriate).
Since I'm done with The Beatles, I'm reverting to more familiar spellings, like Normalization and Standardization (for all of my readers in the United States).
One of my pet peeves about our local library is the way in which the video collection (Blu Rays and DVDs) is shelved. In fairness, the library does a very good job at being an asset to the community, and is overall a very nice place to browse, study or meet. Close to the weekends, however, patrons pillage the video collections, and on most Fridays one finds this section in a shambles. It just happens. My peeve about cataloging and shelving, though, is about alphabetization.
I just did a cursory scan of our videos, and could not find a title that started with a number or number that was spelled out- all of them were numerals: 12:01, 300, 1941, etc. This, of course, is THE proper way to sort a list that contains numerals (if you're uncertain about this, sort something A-Z in Access or Excel). After these, the next titles are The A-Team, The Abyss, and Adventures In Babysitting- a moderately interesting assortment! You're probably wondering why they're sorted this way, and this brings me back to videos at the library... after a quick story about classical music.
I was listening to a classical radio station one day, and I heard the really cool medieval-sounding music that was used in the most excellent Excalibur (1981) movie. I had previously tried to find the soundtrack, but it was out of print and our library didn't have it. When the piece ended, I had pen and paper ready. The announcer said something like "karminabaranakarloff." That's what I wrote down and I headed off to Tower Records. I fortunately spoke with a gentleman in the classical music department there. He knew exactly the piece I was talking about, and handed me a CD. It was Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff.
I was in the ballpark, so to speak. And this is why, although I KNOW the library is wrong to shelve certain titles the way that they do, I tolerate it. You see, the gentleman who knew what I was talking about got me exactly what I wanted, despite- or maybe in spite of, my spelling. And so we go back to my reluctant tolerance of the library's shelving conventions. Although the library is technically wrong, they are wrong for the best of reasons: serving the needs of the public, the sans coulettes, the least common denominator of the public which they serve. If someone is unaware that 300 is a numeral, they will presumably seek the title out under "T"- a logical, but wrong assumption. So, I compromise. I do a bit of organizing whenever we're at the library, primarily because the video section is generally a mess: Dewey has never been applied here.
And that's all for now from here.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data management and analysis so you don't have to.
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