Here are some tips and hints on using the FoAM library and its online catalogue. This focuses on the particular idiosyncrasies of our library and is not a guide to using Zotero or library systems in general. Please refer to the links below or do a search to find out more about this.

The library is organised into the following sections, with their corresponding catalogue tags (Books, Periodicals, etc.):

1. Books shelf Books A to Z by author or title
2. Disks shelf: Disks CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, but also a few video tapes and some peculiar and archaic software
3. Ephemera boxes: brochures, leaflets, postcards, flyers, etc. organised by year
4. Fiction shelf: Fiction mostly paperback fiction books
5. FoAM Propaganda shelf: a shelf of readily accessible FoAM brochures, publications, postcards, etc. for convenient proselytising
6. Magazine and Journal shelf: Periodicals periodicals, including many titles with only one issue
7. Temporary Autonomous Sections: TAS modular extensible subsections that can coagulate or dissolve at any time for particular people, projects, themes
8. Unperiodicals shelf: Unperiodicals reports, conference proceedings, yearbooks

The books shelf is arranged alphabetically from A to Z. In cases where there's no explicitly designated author/editor, items are filed by title. Find things manually by perusing the shelves themselves, or better still search the catalogue by any field (keyword, title, subject), find the author/editor's name, then locate the item on the shelf.

Like other sections, this one is not ordered in any discernible way, but since it is so small, you should still have a chance of finding what you are looking for. You'll just have to browse patiently.

Filed by author from A–Z.

Periodicals with of more than one issue are filed together, mostly in order of issue/date. Titles with only one or two issues are arranged on the shelf roughly by year. Within these parameters, things are largely random (as usual). You will just have to ogle the shelves directly (in conjunction with searching the catalogue) to find what you want.

There is no apparent order to these shelves (if you can devise or suggest one, please do so!). Once you determine that an item is located in this section (by referring to the catalogue), it is largely a matter of trial and error to find it on the shelf.

Good luck in finding anything here. There are roughly three groups of ephemera boxes: 1) ephemera sorted by year, 2) ephemera with no apparent date, and 3) ephemera related to FoAM. If you would like to try to find something specific in this section, we recommend setting aside several hours for random, serendipitous, or stochastic beavering.

These form and dissolve according to need. For example, a TAS could be made for a residency or project related to cooking. Books, journals, and ephemera could be extracted from their usual locations in the library and brought together to form a temporary reference shelf. The only proviso here is that items should be returned to their original locations after the TAS is dissolved. TASed items can be conveniently tracked with tags (see Digital organisation).