You know how it is. You've got a lifetime's worth of VHS cassettes and DVD boxes, all on a couple of groaning shelves in your living room. Blogger John Cooper discusses the perils of trying to get them organised:

Index-phile

The order and indexing of my DVD collection is something that's bugged me for some time. Originally I went for the straightforward alphabetical approach but this seemed out of place with my eclectic tastes, ending up with "Transformers: The Movie" sitting next to "Ultraviolet" and "Violent Cop" next to "Wall-e", which is just wrong.

About 15 years back when I was an avid collector of comics I would write the titles of issues on little index cards in my best hand writing and pin them up on a board in my bedroom, complete with a little doodle of the face of the character in the comic looking smug. Today I'm not afforded such luxury, and the best I can come up with for my DVDs is to loosely split my shelving into various sub-categories. There's 'old telly', 'anime', 'beer movies' , 'subtitled violence' and my beloved 'Doctor Who'.

I was unnecessarily alarmed recently when a fellow Who fan informed me that when the series returns next year, the design of the 'classic series' DVD releases would be updated bringing them in line with the new show. Now, I'm all for change, and accept it's a natural part of the evolutionary process, but all I could think was how my shelf of collected DVDs was suddenly going to look about as consistent as Colin Bakers costume.

Though I took the information with a pinch of salt, I'd be the first one to agree that the 'half and half' grey roundel design that's accompanied the DVD range design since it's inception is getting a bit tired; in fact I'll wager that back when 'Caves of Androzani' was released in 2001 as a means of testing the popularity of the new fangled 'digital versatile disc' technology the sleeve designer had little awareness of the aesthetic rule they were laying down.

But what of my shelf? Unlike most series which get released in chronological order (which is hardly feasible for a show spanning 40 odd years) Doctor Who is released out of order on the basis of criteria I'm yet to work out but seems follow the pattern of good... bad... Sylvester McCoy. So if the box design were to change, anal fans like myself up and down the land would distress as their nicely ordered DVD shelf started to look like the closing down sales at Zavvi.

Last month I converted some of my old Who to DVD from it's original format on 'Video Home System' (VHS, remember that?) to make more shelf space. Then trolling around on the web at two in the morning pleasantly stumbled across sleeve artwork created by fans for some first and second doctor adventures.

I'm now far less worried about even the remotest possibility of the DVDs changing. As I'm sure if it does then nature, or should I say a fan with a scanner and a copy of Photoshop, will find a way of making the whole thing a far less painful proposition.

This is a personal article by John Cooper. How are your DVD shelves organised? You still got any VHS tapes left? Send us a picture if you like. Don't even get started on our book and comic collections.