Has anyone used Slack to facilitate team communications for show production? If so, any ideas, suggestions or a way to import a successful template, please? Or is it yet another distraction?"We trained hard... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization."--Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C."See More

I am taking the first step and admitting I am powerless over all my scripts, plays, acting editions, and worst of all – the dreaded anthologies: "Best Plays of 19xx", "Best Plays of [insert name of Playwright here]". I hit bottom when the library failed me yet again and I just could not stand to see the defunct local theater bookstore's inventory end up in a landfill. How do you organize all your theater books and more importantly find what you need? It has gotten so bad after 50 wonderful years of collecting and thousands of titles that I've actually had to go to the library, or worse, BUY a script that I know I have here somewhere in the house. So I am firmly resolved to do something about it... Ideas please... Computer software? I have a nice Comic Book program that keeps track of my worthless tattered and over-read Duck kid comics... but it doesn't handle the anthology problem well. I could hack around it but it would not be very elegant and would require a painful amount of data entry. It would be very nice just to scan in a lot of the newer stuff with a bar code scanner, or at least add all the blasted anthology titles by internet search without having to type in each stinking play title... It appears there are some on-line book applications (e.g., www.librarything.com/) but again they seem to be primarily book-centric and stumble badly over the Anthology/"Best Plays of..." search for a specific play within the Anthology problem. Nor have I any budget to pay someone a monthly fee to snoop at my library... Gladly pay a reasonable amount for a program, but monthly enslavement cannot be... On top of all that a clunky desktop platform is all I can afford... any "what's-yer-fancy-pads or smartphone plans" sadly just don't fit the budget these days... Also looking for organizational/shelving strategies - group by eras, i.e., Greco-Roman, Shakespeare, Restoration, other eras? Molière? Spanish, Russian, Irish, British, American? Or just group all the rest by author/title after The Bard? Then there's the problem of limited shelf space and book size... From a space efficiency point of view one is tempted to keep all the many acting editions on their own set of shelves - heck with the anthologies and "groups"... does that makes any sense or is it more trouble than it’s worth? Ready? GO! Your solutions, ideas, rants, raves, general laughter and snickering are much appreciated!See More