Anyone with a sizeable collection of videos, games, books, comics, or other commercially-available rectangles eventually faces the inevitable question: how the hell to organise it all on the shelves. I've been steadily refining my answer to that question since I started collecting anime on VHS in the early 90s, and it's only become more complex as the decades roll on. Since I became a librarian, it's grown closer to my professional interests, and I'm curious about people's overall shelving systems and the decisions they make when they encounter a tricky item. With movies and TV shows in particular, it's never been less straightforward. Sure, there are the old basic choices, like whether to shelve The Prisoner under T or P, but now so many properties are part of larger franchises, crossovers, cinematic universes, and so on, it's led my collection to look less and less (at a glance) like it's in any sort of order.
My basic system for videos is to divide them by format first (blu-ray being most accessible, then DVD, and finally VHS is mostly tucked away in a spare wardrobe), and then alphabetically by title. I have so many exceptions now though. All the MCU movies are shelved in release order under Marvel, for example. Spider-Man: Homecoming is slotted in there too, though I did consider keeping it under S instead. Then there were questions like what to do with the Dark Knight trilogy (B for Batman or D for Dark), and what felt like a more unnatural shelving decision where I put Logan under W, despite the Wolverine movies not being a formal trilogy. Having done that, I'm now wondering whether to shelve the Mothra blu-ray in release date order among the Godzilla movies.
In recent years, I've also started dividing up certain movies by studio. I used to shelve Disney animated classics and Ghibli movies purely by title, but now they all go in release date order under D and G respectively. That's based more on my viewing habits, since watching one of those movies usually puts me in the mood for more of the same.
Having so many anime and toku videos brings up the complication of differing title versions too. So I've ended up with Star Blazers 2199 shelved as Space Battleship Yamato, The Eternal Zero shelved under F for its awful UK title The Fighter Pilot, and various other odd situations. In retrospect, I'm not that consistent with anime, since the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series is under N in the DVD section, but the rebuild movies are under E among the blu-rays. Mobile Police Patlabor ended up under P, since some release have moved Mobile Police to the end of the title or dropped it altogether. And of course Gundam series are always G because they would be a logistical nightmare otherwise.
So how do you go about shelving things? Have you run into any particularly difficult decisions or weird outliers? Am I the only one who spends more than two seconds thinking about this stuff?