Glushko, Robert J. ed. The Discipline of Organizing.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. 025 Disci ISBN: 978-0262518505
Organizing is such a common activity that we
often do it without thinking much about it. In our daily lives we organize
physical things--books on shelves, cutlery in kitchen drawers--and digital
things--Web pages, MP3 files, scientific datasets. Millions of people create
and browse Web sites, blog, tag, tweet, and upload and download content of all
media types without thinking "I'm organizing now" or "I'm
retrieving now."
This book offers a framework for the theory and
practice of organizing that integrates information organization (IO) and
information retrieval (IR), bridging the disciplinary chasms between Library
and Information Science and Computer Science, each of which views and teaches
IO and IR as separate topics and in substantially different ways. It introduces
the unifying concept of an Organizing System--an intentionally arranged
collection of resources and the interactions they support--and then explains
the key concepts and challenges in the design and deployment of Organizing
Systems in many domains, including libraries, museums, business information
systems, personal information management, and social computing. Intended for
classroom use or as a professional reference, the book covers the activities
common to all organizing systems: identifying resources to be organized;
organizing resources by describing and classifying them; designing
resource-based interactions; and maintaining resources and organization over
time. The book is extensively annotated with disciplinary-specific notes to
ground it with relevant concepts and references of library science, computing,
cognitive science, law, and business.
