I know. I'm a genius.
While I was working in the choral library in at my school, I realized that the only way to show what all I was doing was to photo-document. But, like many of my projects, it didn't dawn on me until about a week in.
When I first walked into the 10x20 room, you couldn't see the floor or the tops of the 14 file cabinets or the tops of two tables. The floor was covered with scattered choir uniforms, tons of octavos (that choir music that looks like a little booklet but without staples so the inside pages easily fall out) and random photo copied hand-outs, worksheets, tests, calendars, text books and student papers. The tables were covered with electric keyboards, all their accessories, random parts of the risers (the steps that choirs stand on) and boxes full of more unsorted music. And the file cabinets and uniform cabinets were blocked in by the 12 large, black aluminum guard rails that go on the back of the risers.
The room looked like the bedroom of a hoarder. The kind of room where you'd open the door, throw things in, then shut the door and forget about it.
First off, it really is a just a storage room. In fact, the choir room and band room are really an old gym that's been wonderfully renovated. The band instrument storage room is the old boys' locker room. The orchestra storage is the old boys' shower room. And my storage room is the old girl's shower room. And as wonderful a job as they did in the actual room, the only complaint I have is that they didn't level out the floor in the shower room. It still slopes toward the center of the room where I imagine there is still a drain under the tile floor. So none of the cabinets sit upright and you feel drunk walking around the room because you're constantly adjusting your center of balance.
But I renamed it the Choral Library (and made a little sign saying thusly) so folks would hopefully not treat it like the room at aunt Millie's that you don't go into.
A couple directors ago sorta filed. She at least threw them into evelopes and then into a WWII era file cabinet that required two people to open. (seriously, it was stamped "U.S. Army Air Force" on the back. It's been 50+ years since the Air Force separated from the Army.)
They weren't in any kind of order and none of them had been stamped with the school stamp or their file number so they all had to come out.
Next they go into piles to be stamped and have a lavender file card with a label indicating the pieces name, composer and arranger made.
This library is on a number system. As new pieces are added to the library, they are not sorted alphabetically. If it were alphabetical, you would have to shift drawers to make room every time you added a new piece. Numerically, you just put it at the back of the last file cabinet and assign the next number.
BUT this only works if you have an updated catalogue that allows you to sort the library by title and composer so you can find what you're looking for.
The file numbers go to 976. The catologue stopped at 781. And the director had only left me a hard copy and no disc.
Thank my lucky stars I ran into the director who made the original catalogue, and was apparently the last one to actually keep the library organized, over the summer. She had a disc copy that stopped at... you guessed it: 781. Which meant I had nearly 200 titles, with an average of 50 copies per title, (1000 pieces of music) to sort, file stamp, school stamp, index, record and file.
THEN I realized that someone over the last few years has been shifting files and reassigning file numbers without updating the hard copy. So I had to go through all 14 file cabinets and basically rewrite the whole damn thing. And in doing so, discovered that the files were all backwards. The highest numbers were on the left, the lowest on the right. So all 14 cabinets were pulled out and reversed.
Finally, I started filing so I would end up with something more OCD compliant like this.
But then I started going through the stacks and stacks of music that weren't even in envelopes and the whole process starts again.
I filled and emptied that table more times than I remember.
But it's so pretty now. I'll take more pictures now that I know how techno savvy I am.
Note on the choral library: Remember that this used to be a shower room. There are windows on two walls. And the third and fourth floors can see into the room. I'm really really hopeful that the old windows were frosted.
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