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What is "ordinology," anyway?

Ordinology is a fictional occupation described in Alexei Panshin's 1968 Hugo Award-winning novel Rite of Passage:

"If you think of the limits of what we know as a great suite of rooms inhabited by vast numbers of incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted people, all of whom are eccentric recluses, then an ordinologist is somebody who comes in every so often to clean up. He picks up the books around the room and puts them where they belong. He straightens everything up. He throws away the junk that the recluses have kept and cherished, but for which they have no use. And then he leaves the room in condition for outsiders to visit while he's busy cleaning up next door. He bears about the same resemblance to the middle-aged woman who checks out books in the quad library as one of our agriculturists does to a primitive [colonial] farmer, but if you stretched a point, you might call him a librarian."

I chose the domain name in the early days of the web; Rite of Passage is one of my favorite books, and one of my skills is creating a clear conceptual framework from a bunch of seemingly unrelated ideas that others have come up with, so the name seemed appropriate. Now I sometimes wish I had chosen something easier for people to spell.

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