Keep it simple. Books only have purpose if they are used, and they can only be used if they can be found. Though there is a certain romance to delving deep into the stacks of an ancient library in search of an even more ancient tome, that scenario represents a failure on the part of the library, a failure that renders huge swathes of their inventory useless. How much time is wasted in those searches? How much more could have been accomplished with that time?
Easy enough said, but certainly not as easily done. It's all well and good to pledge to a library where all the books are in the right places to be found, but it's not like librarians go out of their way to create a disordered jumble - it emerges inevitably despite the best of intentions. To avoid that will require careful thought on your part, but before any of that, the masons require instruction. Well, there's one major advantage you have over the average librarian, and that is that your library will not be hemmed in by immovable streets and expensive buildings. You explain to the masons that the site of the library will require a lot of space and even more room to expand and leave them to survey the existing halls and caverns of the mountain. If no suitable site presents itself then your library can be hewn into untouched stone, but if there's an existing part of the mountain that can be adapted, so much the better.
You make your way back home and to your library, and as you enter you try to see it with fresh eyes. Excluding fiction, you currently have ten categories, but these are divisions born of necessity rather than strict logic. You have three categories on magic because of the necessity of your books on subjects like Chaos and Necromancy and Dark Magic to be less accessible than books on magical theory, but in any rational system they would fall under the same category. You have zoology separate from the other sciences because of the number of books you've accumulated on the topic. You have the study of societies divided up on the basis of whether they are friendly or hostile to the Empire. This works well enough for a personal collection, but that won't do for a truly grand library.
You turn your mind to the various libraries you've encountered over the years. Some arrange their works entirely by the name of the author or, even worse, by their order of acquisition, and depend entirely on indexes, catalogues, and the memory of the librarians to find works on specific topics. You know some libraries consider all fields of study to be separate branches of philosophy, and once eavesdropped on a rather heated debate on whether aesthetics was a subbranch of applied philosophy or a branch in its own right, which rather highlights the trouble with such lofty divisions - it turns the discussion into one of values, rather than practicality. Other libraries consider the entire corpus of writings split into the three categories of Morals, Science, and Devotion, which seems actively unhelpful to you. The libraries of the Colleges are focused almost entirely on magical theory and the specializations of their Orders, the Great Library of Altdorf is split according to the subjects of the University of Altdorf it adjoins, and you've heard the Great Library of Marienburg is as much an organ of government as it is a body of knowledge and as such focuses a great deal on jurisprudence and the civil records of the city.
Well, if you are to avoid the mistakes of the past, then perhaps it is best to break entirely with the way they've done things. The philosophical exactitude of the division is irrelevant, what matters is whether it helps or hinders those looking for books on a specific topic. Any set of divisions will do as long as it is easily comprehended and is consistently and universally applied. All philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge and its most natural divisions can and must be disregarded, as you are not pursuing some abstract truth, you need a robust system of division for the books that exist here and now, in an imperfect world and written by imperfect beings. You look over your shelves again and start planning.
Magic, of course, will need to be its own section, as to do otherwise would be to run immediately afoul of the Articles. And as much as an argument might be made for it to be a subheading of magic, divinity would need to be on its own unless you want to grossly insult everyone who would be supplying the books that would fill it. But the rest of the topics can and should be compressed down: geography and zoology are themselves subsets of Natural Philosophy, which covers the study of the natural forces of the world and their applications, which leaves only where the natural world has been supplanted by thinking beings: Social Philosophy. Four neat divisions that can themselves be subdivided into separate fields. At first each subdivision can have its own shelf, and later its own bookshelf, and eventually, perhaps, its own hall, depending on the final design of the library.
You run your eye over your current library, mentally dividing up the books in front of you. Your section on Sciences and Arts would need to be split up, as Linguistics and Trade would fall under Social Philosophy while most of the rest would be Natural Philosophy. But Architecture trips you up, as it is, in essence, the application of Natural Philosophy to construct the edifices of Social Philosophy. You uneasily move on, and find yourself frowning again as you reach one of the smaller sections: War. Among many volumes on the art of wielding a greatsword - which itself does not fit as comfortably as you'd like into the heading of Natural Philosophy - are a handful of Skaven books on tactics and logistics, and you again find yourself unsure. It might be accurate to call warfare a subdivision of Social Philosophy, but that itself feels more like an invitation to philosophical musing than it does a clean categorization. This is a problem that most institutions avoid entirely, as the Universities are dedicated to peaceful pursuits while the art of war is studied at places like the Diesdorf Military College and the Aquila Academy, and on the religious side of things Verena leaves the study of war to Myrmidia. Do you carve out a new section entirely for War? Or do you go right back to the drawing board and come up with divisions that don't have this problem?
Okay, say you start over. Magic and Divinity can stay. Perhaps the problem is in philosophy, which as a term has a great deal of historical heft but perhaps is not best suited for a library that should be serving those who get dirt and blood on their hands. Let us instead consider science, the term preferred by the worldlier institutions. You can copy the previous divisions over as Natural Science and Social Science, but in this framing a third suggests itself: Applied Science. This would neatly solve the problem of War and Architecture, as both would fall under this new category, but would it create new problems? You're already separating books according to whether they're applied or not, aren't you? If you had books on plants in your library, they'd be alongside the zoological texts, well separate to Agriculture. Books on Physics would be separate to books on Engineering. You'd have to split up your section on Chemistry, but it would not be a difficult division, as the weighty tomes on theoretical chemistry are easily split off from the smaller, hardier books that tell one the precise steps necessary to produce things like acids and explosives.
Magic, Divinity, Natural Science, Social Science, Applied Science. You toy with the idea of applying the theme across the board, but Divine Science seems like it might be a controversial heading and Magical Science implies the study of all the headings it would contain, some of which you are bound by the Articles not to do. You might need to add more sections in the future - Fiction, perhaps - but those five seem like they would neatly encompass the earliest additions. You jot down those headings and the thoughts that gave rise to them and tuck them away in a corner of your library. There's still more work to be done, details about bookshelf design and indexing and catalogues and whatnot, but no need to frontload all that effort when the masons are still wandering around looking for a good place to start swinging a pick.
There's also the question of acquisitions. From a Dwarven perspective, the Library began existing the moment the masons set eyes on Kvinn-Wyr. This might mean you're going to be stacking up books in awkward corners of your home for a while, but that's a sacrifice you're willing to make.
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Library Purchases:
[ ] [LIBRARY] Barak Varr booksellers: name three public topics to acquire all available Empire and Dwarven books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Library of Mournings: name two non-magical topics to hire Cityborn scribes to copy all available Laurelorn books on.
[ ] [LIBRARY] Back-fill.
Instead of seeking books on specific topics, fill in some of the sections of your existing library where you have some of the available books from the Empire and the Dwarves on a subject, but not all. Will acquire more books total than other options, but cannot be directed.
Dwarf Favour Purchases
Aethyric Vitae can be spent instead of favour at an exchange rate of 3 favour per gallon; for Rune-related purchases, this will also guarantee the cooperation of Runelords who may otherwise be disinterested. To use this, simply add 'paid by Vitae' or similar to an item you are voting for.
[ ] [DWARF] No purchase.
[ ] [DWARF] Write-in.
College Favour Purchases
[ ] [COLLEGE] No purchase.
[ ] [COLLEGE] Write-in.
Other Purchases
[ ] [PURCHASE] No purchase.
[ ] [PURCHASE] Write-in.
- There will be a three hour moratorium.
- Mathilde can spend her own money on buying additional books at the usual rate under Other Purchases. The coming turn will have options to unlock new acquisition methods.
- 'Science' being used here is a bit anachronistic in English, but the Empire doesn't speak English. 'Wissenschaft' was widely used in German significantly earlier than 'science' was in English.
- I've added the Waystone Project and the Library to the Organizations threadmark.
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