WARNING: This is general computer science theory that probably applies in a reasonable way to TMP. I am posting it because a lot of people have legit interest in the maintenance downtime and thought it might help understand.
Imagine you have just introduced a young new wargamer to the historical side of the hobby. To mark this occasion, you presented her with her first military history book and a brand new bookshelf. Good on ya!
She places the book on the left end of the lower shelf. Over the next few months, she engages in a frenzy of acquisitions. Many of her books deal with different periods. She also realizes that there are other relationships among her books besides chronology. She learns to see parallels between the Early Roman Empire and the British Empire of the 19th Century. She finds an underlying thread in civil uprisings across the centuries. Awesome!
Day after day, she adds to her collection, putting each book adjacent to the last, then moving up a shelf when necessary.
One day, she goes in to her one shelf full library to find her books on Tunnni and Sparticus for some comparative reading with respect to her new book on Toussaint L'Ouverture. Crap, where are those two? She scans the shelf for about five minutes and learns a very important adult life lesson about staring right at something you are looking for but not being able to see it.
OK. She pulls all the books down and puts them back on the shelf in chronological order. This is reindexing.
Having done that, she is happy. And her collection continues to grow. Two shelves into her next shelf, she gets the idea to grab the book on the colonial wars in New Zealand that she got a couple months ago and re-read it along with that book on Haitian colonization. The Haitian book is on the old shelf, in order, but the New Zealand one is somewhere in the new two shelves. So she decides to reindex again. Doing this, she has to both scan the old shelves to find new places, and make room for them by sliding books around.
She realizes that this takes quite a while, but considers it to be worth the work since she is more frequently looking for, retrieving, and reading old books than buying new ones. Obviously, you have failed to impart an important lesson about the hobby.
Another time saving method she came up with was "proxy books" Instead of having just a chronological sorting of her library, she has other sections arranged by topics (like slave revolts and colonial wars). Instead of having copies of the books for each section, she puts in a placeholder for them, with a note where to get the actual book. Again, a great time-saver for content searching, but it does add to the time to reindex.
After she gets he fifth shelf done, she decides to change her approach. Instead of waiting for a period of time to elapse or a certain number of unsorted books to accumulate, she decides to just put each new book and its proxies in their appropriate place once acquired. This is a lot faster than a full resort, but it still is a function of the total number of books and you have to do it every acquisition. After some quick calculation, she decides that the total time spent is about the same, but doing it the new way seems far less fatiguing, so, again awesome!
Another time saver she came up with was to leave some space on shelves. She learned this by noticing that libraries leave empty space on the shelves to aid in the insertion of new acquisitions. Librarians are obviously very intelligent and awesome people. The drawback is, of course, that for eight shelves of books, she now has to have ten total shelves. And every once in a while, she has to do a big move when the local extra shelf space fills up.
Now, four years later, she has decided to reevaluate her collection. Even with the efficiencies, its becoming a tough row to hoe to keep up with new books. Well, there are several books, that while foundational, she hasn't touched in a few years. And there are a number of "fluff" books that while fun when they were new, just really don't contribute anything now (like that book of Latin swear words or the one of funny Victorian idiomatic expressions). OK, but to do a purge, she really wants to take a hard look at what she has, how she uses it, what the losses would mean, and ultimately is it worth it.
The next chapter is up to you …
