Collections are filled with layers of meaning. I am sure many of you will know the wonderful scene in High Fidelity where Rob Gordon is sorting his record collection.

Though I don’t think I could sort my CD collection end to end this way I could probably tell you fairly accurately when and where I got nearly every disc in it. And some – like Rob’s Fleetwood Mac record – have specific stories attached.

In the late nineties an old friend and I were in Dragonfly Discs on Elizabeth Street, Melbourne (which no longer exists) and came across two copies of Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work Volume II. It was quite a moment – until then we thought it was only available in an expensive box set which contained all her albums (which we already owned) plus two discs of rarities, B-sides and remixes. But this was in the early days of the internet and news sometimes travelled slowly. Had it been released? And where was Volume I, which contained the real gems?

So we set off around the city, hitting every record store we could think of, asking staff and scouring the ‘B’ section of every rack we could find looking for Volume I. No sign. We decided the presence of Volume II must have been a freak occurrence – maybe from a faulty box set or two – and scampered back to Dragonfly to get a copy each. I remember many weeks, possibly months, later my friend ringing me and saying: ‘Guess what I got?’ I knew instantly – This Woman’s Work Volume I. Eventually I tracked down a copy for myself – again in Dragonfly Discs.

Kate Bush is one of my favourite artists, to the point where the same friend and I flew to London last August to see her in concert. But there are plenty of other items in my collection with stories attached. I bought Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Kicking Against the Pricks in 1992 from Gaslight Records on Bourke Street – at the time one of the top indie record stores in the city – but, more significantly, the following year I ran down the road after school and got it signed by Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld, Martyn P Casey, Thomas Wydler and Mick Harvey in Virgin Megastore. Mick Harvey said he liked my Cruel Sea t-shirt; I – a spotty and awkward teenager – was too stunned to say anything at all.

John Lee Hooker, Mr Lucky: bought at HMV on Princes Street in Edinburgh when I was travelling through the UK with my parents in 1991; Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, I Learned the Hard Way: snatched in victory after a drunken scramble on the ground for one of a few copies thrown into the crowd at Soul-A-Go-Go. Pavlov’s Dog, Pampered Menial: bought for $10 at Dirt Cheap Discs in Collins Place after I mentioned Pavlov’s conditioning experiment at work and a colleague said ‘what, you mean the band?’ When I saw it I had to buy it and find out who they were. She Keeps Bees eponymous EP: bought from the duo themselves at Bowery Ballroom in New York City, May 2011, just after their set, which blew headliner Anna Calvi and support Cuckoo Chaos off the stage. The EP is underwhelming but their performance was fantastic.

Despite all that, the bulk of my CD collection is sorted alphabetically by artist, then chronologically within artist. This in itself raises issues for the inner compulsive in me which a good cataloguer might be able to solve. When Polly Jean Harvey started putting out records PJ Harvey was the name of her band, but after Rid Of Me she started releasing solo albums as PJ Harvey. Does that mean technically I should split them between P and H? (I don’t.) When Bowie rejected pop superstardom he released an album by Tin Machine, not an album by David Bowie. Should I file this under T, away from my extensive run of Bowie albums? (I do, in part because it seems in the spirit of the break he was trying to make at the time.) In my separate classical section should I sort by composer or primary artist? It’s all very complicated.

My vinyl collection – smaller at this stage – is a more idiosyncratic sort, based on vague sections like “stuff I might play while DJing”, “old records I got from my parents” and “recent purchases”. It’s a movable feast. And my books are all over the place. In my younger years I experimented with alphabetical, chronological, genre and thematic sorts, even arrangements based on size and colour. (One of my friends at the time, an artist, kept all her books with the spines facing in to create a wall of white pages, which meant she could only access specific books by knowing their size and shape.) But in recent years I have moved so regularly and am so perpetually short of shelf space that I never seem to get them into any order.

Regardless, I know what’s there and why. In and between them all – even the bad ones – I see stories and memories, narratives and connections, hidden delights and buried sorrows. Amongst these, numerous personal idiosyncracies are embodied in items which would likely seem glaringly out of place to anyone but me. We all have them, those books or albums that cause people to wrinkle their nose and frown. “Why do you have a copy of this?”

Though archivists try to maintain ‘original order’ or ‘order as found’, the reality is that whatever order (or disorder) my personal collections are in, the webs of meaning they create are always also autobiographical. In the case of my alphabetised CDs you could even say the collection contains rich, layered networks of personal meaning despite, rather than because of, the order in which it is kept.

All this creates questions for those of us who work with collections. I have written about the value of collections here before, but more recently I’ve been wondering: what are we missing? What is being lost? When working with collections I love the sudden glimpsed connections, the appearance of hidden meaning where before there was just a pile of stuff. If we do manage to uncover these pathways should we try to capture them? If the answer is yes, how?

We all have limited time and resources – increasingly limited in the GLAM sector, it often seems – so where does our value lie? We might resort to a quick list of contents, but if I did that with my CD collection I would be spending my time documenting what anyone standing in my living room could see for themselves, or anyone online could see with a few high resolution photographs. Such a list increases discoverability, but at the expense of what? Isn’t the value I can create actually in the personal stories and recollections, the reasons why this particular set of stuff ended up together in my living room in the first place, rather than in the recitation of the self-evident in a different (albeit more accessible) form?

I haven’t documented my own collections, but there’s little doubt I’m the sort of person who will one day. When I do, rather than sorting my collection autobiographically maybe I’ll try autobiographical collection documentation instead.