Manual Alphabet Sorting Practice

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I have an interview for a Job as a Library. As one of the test I will have to sort books in alphabetical order. I need software or something that will give me practice. My google searching is not successful at the moment.

if you know the alphabet then why not just practice with real books? or CDs, or whatever you have?

I have more books then average joe but that would not be very effective. I did find some software though.

Good luck with your interview!

There are several sorting schemes which reduce the need for active thinking and actual effort. I never got far into it when I worked at the post office, but what you can do is check out wikipedia and sources.

There are techniques of pile or bin sorts card sorts, and also one where you sort from the last letter back, but that might not work well with titles of varying length.

Unfortunately web pages on function sorting dominates the web, but reading on some of these such as bubble sorts will give you some ideas. They are taken from real life sorts anyway.

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I gave it some thought. What I used to do while sorting letters by house and street was to sort piles of common street number into piles. In terms of alphabet I would say sort out all the x y and z, but you dont want to be picking things up and putting them down repeatedly. But you can legitimately sort those into one pile and ignore them.

In terms of books you could sort into letter groups of four perhaps.

Things like T and E are going to be big piles, so depending on the total number of books you are dealing with, you will want to completely sort those first(if a large pile) or the odds and ends if the pile is small.

The idea is to make good apparent progress early on. Its a sort of presort, and you can get an unsorted pile worked into a semi sorted state. This is good for if someone else has to finish your work, or you have to come back to it later.

Its important to remember that everyone sorts differently.

I get the feeling that fiction will have a greater variety of titles, while non fiction will cluster around the T letters.

Here are (supposedly) the most common first letters in words

Other techniques are to pick up several items at once. It will save you some motion to hold three+ books at a time. You can take a semi sorted pile and shelve them, eliminating it entirely
Key topics:
1. Eliminate unnecessary movements. Especially long reaches, bending, or traveling.
2. Discriminate. There wont be a lot of titles starting with X, so dont go looking for them. Set them aside when you stumble across them so you are not continuously shuffling them out of the way.
3. Sort by word. This will take longer but you will learn to recognise patterns. This is where speed really happens.
4. The act of throwing a book back is an unsort technique. Dont do it if you can avoid it. Its also a waste of time.
5. Dont semi sort to an extreme, you will lose time.


Finally, ask a librarian for tips ahead of time. But a lot of NTs cannot articulate learned technique.

Thanks all.