Approach of Readers for Documents:

As stated earlier, documents can be arranged in libraries on the basis of the colour of the binding, the size, the language, the year of publication, the accession number and so on. But these methods are outdated and unhelpful, as they cannot bring to the notice of the reader the author, the title or the subject matter of a document. There is little or no chance of your finding today a library, which arranges its collection on the basis of colour, size, year of publication or even the name of the publisher. It was possible to use these characteristics for arranging books when the collections were very small in size. 

There are a few libraries where the collections are arranged on the basis of accession number or serial number. The other methods by which documents are usually arranged are by title, author or subject. This is because in present-day libraries, the reader's approach for a specific document is by title or author or subject.

It is common practice that fiction is arranged by author, periodicals by title and scientific factual literature by subject. In some libraries, you can find that even imaginative literature (belles letters) is arranged first by language, and within each language by form followed by author and, if necessary, by work number. It has already been explained in Section 2.1 that a reader may demand a document by a particular author or of a particular title or on a particular subject.