Joe Theobald, aka DJ Captain Wormhole, Looks at all things vinyl 

HERE at the Swindon Advertiser we never shy away from the really tough questions, the big debates, the divisive issues; the sort of stuff that risks our social cohesion, hotly contested conflicts of opinion with the potential to fracture our civilised liberal society.

Grappling with the ideological equivalents of fracking or placing a nuclear bomb in the San Andreas fault isn’t easy, but someone’s got to do it, and this week I’ve been considering one of the greatest questions of all – how should one order one’s records?

Carl Cox has his in chronological order. High Fidelity’s Rob Fleming opts for a biographical approach. Most record stores simply use the alphabet as their organisational yardstick (solo artists by surname, of course; ‘the’ is generally overlooked for ‘The’ bands). But which way is the best way?

I like the genre approach. It’s how my own collection is roughly organised and it seems to be the most convenient when you’re having a mix, and as long as you’re not excessively pedantic about whether Willie Bobo should reside alongside the Latin Jazz as opposed to the Boogaloo then it doesn’t raise too many catalogical issues.

The genre approach is also well suited to a collector who utilises the beloved Ikea Kallax system – shelving units with ‘cubes’ perfectly sized for the vinyl-ey orientated. I have a cube of house, a cube and a half of hip-hop, two cubes of Latin, one of disco etc… I also read about one interesting method where you place the record you most recently played right at the back of the stack in an effort to keep rotating though your library. It’s a nice idea but hardly practical for anyone with more than 100 or so records.

If you are on the more dedicated end of the spectrum you might like to consider the solution adopted by a man from Perth, Australia. Brad Miocevich went one step further than Giles Peterson (widely rumoured to own a separate London flat solely for his records) when he built a three-storey house out of glass and steel to house his 30,000 strong collection.

Ultimately, it’s all down to personal preference and as long as everything goes back in to the correct sleeve who cares.