A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reconstructs how one college laboratory's steward decided when to send for more, and what the decision cost the third-term practical class.
A teaching laboratory's stock ledger is read as an inventory policy and set beside the classes it left waiting
The School of Underlying Conditions keeps a reference collection of described soil profiles, and has this month placed beside it the transcription of somebody else’s stock book. The transcription is the basis of The Steward Ordered at Two Bottles: An Inventory-Theoretic Reading of One Teaching Laboratory’s Reagent Ledger, a research poster by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, and Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer.
A surveyor is taught to ask how far apart the holes ought to be. The steward was asking how far apart the orders ought to be. I do not think either of us would claim to have finished.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
The poster brings the mathematics of stock control into alignment with eleven sessions of an agricultural college’s laboratory record. It rebuilds what stood on the shelf week by week across 46 reagents and 3,418 entries, establishes the level at which the first steward sent for more, which was two bottles, and places that habit alongside the 212 issues the ledger marks as deferred. Most of those fall in third term, on five reagents, when the quantitative class met. A second steward later raised four order points, and the exercises concerned were afterwards issued a term earlier.
The University is glad to see one of its schools extend to a storeroom clerk the close attention it ordinarily reserves for ground. Dr Emenike said the ledger had “been read with roughly the patience it was kept with, which is as much as a column of figures can reasonably expect”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.kmdh7v.