New library in my under-construction mid-century modern layout room.
Understanding how the brain works, how it reacts to visual material, experiences it, and remembers things plays a major role in our hobby. For deeper dives, subjects that warrant closer study and reflection, print is more effective than digital. The experience has more depth and we remember things longer. Each has its place, but it’s important to know the distinction between how we interact and process them.
Over the years our collection of print media piles up. Without realizing it, archiving becomes an issue. It’s human nature that we aren’t going to access something if a) we can’t find it in the first place and b) we have to dig through mounds of crap to access it.
This is my current (unworkable) system. Look familiar? First, it’s in the Downtown Spur layout room in the basement. If I want to browse, I need to walk downstairs. Second, those large magazine sleeves make it hard to tell what’s in the box. Plus, the cardboard ones fall apart over time. The big pile on the bottom shelf? What’s in it? Your guess is as good as mine. The system sucks and, as a result, I don’t access my content as much as I’d like.
The topic is important to me and I thought it through over a fair amount of time, as an overall system. Step one was to identify the magazines I access the most. Second, I needed a better binding system. Finally, I needed a library on the main floor of my house.
I gutted and renovated a closet in the upstairs LAJ layout room and modified it to be the library. Second, I separated out the most used magazines. Those ones featured articles on the LAJ, B&O Georgetown Branch, Canton RR, and Brooklyn. I purchased some ingenious magazine holders from Amazon, mounted the magazines in 1 1/2″, three-ring binders, and labeled the spine.
Here’s the first binder. I’ll make additional ones grouped by subject (MRP, specific layout features, etc.)
I can already tell this will be a much more user-friendly system that will result in me accessing the content much more frequently.