Essay - Solving a Problem While Working for a Small Company that...

Solving A Problem

***** working for a small company that published books and magazines about assembling model airplanes, I was part of a small group who wrote instructions. Most ***** the job entailed research about paints, glues, and plastics. Over time, we began collecting sources about all kinds of things which we could look up if we ever had questions pertaining to what we *****re writing about at the time. Also, because we were writers, we had various ***** on grammar, punctu*****i*****, and style ***** we used for reference as well.

***** collection of sources consisted of *****, books, articles, and tests we had conducted. Each writer ***** a small collection they kept in their office. As time went on, other people ***** the company would come to us *****king ***** we knew about a particular kind of glue, paint, or some o*****r thing that ***** related to putting the models together. We ********** becoming popular ***** this assorted collection ***** resources and one day we realized if ***** put all of our sources together, we might have the start ***** a pretty good mini library.

We were in agreement that we did need a central location for our references, as well as a system ***** borrowing or sources f***** others outside our dep*****rtment.

In our spare time, we cleaned out a corner and rescued an old bookshelf that *****one else has tossed away. We compiled all of ***** sources *****d very quickly filled the bookshelf.

In the beginning, our system of borrowing operated on ***** "merit system." Anyone ***** wanted to borrow a book or magazine simply ***** their name on a sheet of paper. That worked ***** in the beg*****ning - as not many people outside our department borrowed items. But eventually, that began to change and ***** our ***** grew, the numbers of borrowers did, too. We keep adding books and magazines until *****e day we realized we had five bookshelves of source material. We were suddenly faced with an inventory problem and a situation that could spin out of control, should we allow it.

To add to the problem, some ***** would appear to be lost, never to be seen again. W*****h no way ***** track ***** missing *****s, there was no way to recover them. ***** knew ***** had to come up ***** a way to keep ***** of our "*****."

We decided the best ***** to do ***** was to enter the sources into our current data base program. Every day at lunch for several weeks, each writer would take a stack of sources ***** enter *****m ***** the d*****a *****. We included the name of ***** source and what type of in*****mation was in the *****. This ***** tedious, but it was worth ***** when we ***** we ***** over 800 sources in ***** data base. Entering each source into the ***** base automatically gave the ***** an ident*****ication number so at least we ***** what we had in the library.

***** did