Tom Hutchinson asked about how best to arrange his roll collection
on a shelf, in order to facilitate finding specific rolls easily.

There are several different ways you can do this, choosing which one
you use will depend on your own personal preferences.  I'd suggest
that, before starting, Tom pause to think for a minute how his mind
works when he's trying to recall particulars about a roll he's not
played in a while.  Does he recall it as "that classical piece by
Mozart that Schnabel played," or does the title typically leap to mind?
The point of this exercise being that if he tends to recall artist, or
composer, or type of music before recalling a specific title, then it
would likely be more helpful to organize by those categories than
strictly by title.

That being said, one suggestion might be to assign a particular
shelf or section of shelves to a specific type of music, then a
subsection of that for a specific composer (or perhaps artist,
depending on your personal preferences) and then alphabetize by title
within that subsection, and if two pieces with the same title but
played by different artists, then perhaps alphabetize those by artist.

A notation within the database about where a particular roll would be
located e.g. "section one, subsection two, column three, row four"
could easily be notated as 1.2.3.4 in the database.  By dividing into
sections and subsections, an addition to the collection is only going
to alter part of this notation, and insure that the new addition can be
found as easily as any other.

Bryan Cather