After several years of university teaching and research, I had amassed a typical collection of books, monographs, dissertations, journals and articles, but I was experiencing increasing difficulty in locating any given item in my shelves or files, or even remembering for sure if it was included within my holdings. In part this was due to an overly-segmented filing system. I had one section of works stored alphabetically by author, another organized by topic (e.g. articles on the subjunctive), another in a file called Graduate Reading List, another organized as a bibliography for a seminar on reflexive constructions which I was preparing, and yet another grouped around the topic of auxiliary verbs which I was researching for an article. Yet my holdings were at the same time under-organized, in the sense that I had a large pile of photocopies in my faculty office which I had recently obtained but which were awaiting a thorough perusal before being filed. And I had another such pile at home. There were even some stray items floating around which did not come under any of the above categories. I realized that the effectiveness of my future research depended partly on wresting some greater order out of this labyrinth. So I decided to develop a coherent, rational listing of all my holdings, utilizing the function (alphabetizing and ordering) capabilities of my word processor.' I have divided my catalog into three sections: one for General Linguistics sources, another for Spanish-related Books, Dissertations & Monographs and a third for Spanishrelated articlesmore than a thousand items in all. Each is alphabetized by author, and multiple listings by a single author are ordered chronologically. I keep one printout in the office and another at home. My own library now seems to be more under my own control. I would therefore like to share the procedures necessary to accomplish such a task with colleagues who find themselves in a similar predicament. The only requirement is that your word processing program include a SORT function. My system consists of an IBM/compatible computer with two floppy drives, a dot-matrix printer and MicroSoft-Word (version 4). Therefore, the specific steps I cite below are often couched in DOS/Word terminology, but the principles are applicable to most other equipment. To create a catalog, start your word processor and make a new file, calling it perhaps CATALOG1, or something similar. Leave ample margins all around for possible future annotations on the printed page. Turn on your word processor's page-numbering function, so that the pages of the printout will come out numbered. If you choose to title your document, it should begin with the word a; e.g. A CATALOG OF SPANISH ARTICLES. This is because the computer's sorting function will treat your title just like your data entries (bibliographical items), and will alphabetize it along with them. Starting your title with the letter a followed by ensures that it will appear at the head of the document.2 Or you could simply wait to add the title until after the bibliography has been successfully sorted. Type in your first bibliographical entry, followed by . The entry is now formatted as a paragraph, which is the unit recognized by the MS-Word SORT function; i.e., Word sorts paragraphs, beginning with their first character. You might wish to double check that your word processor also sorts by paragraphs. If it takes some other unit as its sort base, then modify the preceding instruction accordingly. Format the paragraph comprising the first entry as a (see Figure 1). This ensures that if an entry is more than one print line long, the succeeding lines of that entry will be indented, making the author's last name stand out at the left margin. Paragraphs for all subsequent data entries should carry on this hanging indent format. Continue