[msmitha]

I was shocked to discover how the British Library (millons of books, many many new ones every week) manages this. The first book to arrive earlier this year went on the shelf at 2025.0000001. The next went at 2025.0000002, right next to it. The electronic catalogue does the rest. No need to re-shuffle books around, but not a solution supportive of book-browsing.

[crazygringo]

Reminds me of how Amazon doesn't arrange its items by similarity like a store does, so a model of vacuum cleaner might be next to a set of kitchen plates. They actually intentionally avoid similarities so pickers won't accidentally grab a similar but wrong thing.

I lose track of so many infrequently used objects in my home -- which storage bin in which closet did I put the x-acto blade refills in? -- and one bin will overflow while another is half-empty because I try to keep similar items together. Sometimes I fantasize about tracking every possession in a spreadsheet that points to which bin, so I'd never lose anything and could always use storage space with maximum efficiency. But then I know I'd be lazy and skip updating the spreadsheet when I put something new away... plus it just seems so inhumanly weird, like something a robot would so rather than a person.