We organize things, we organize information, and we organize information about things. When we compare these activities, some contrasts are easy to see. But philosophers and others have long debated the differences and relationships between things and information, and the debate continues because no one has been able to propose distinctions that make sense in every situation.
I propose to unify many perspectives about organizing and information with the concept of an Organizing System, defined as an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support. Every Organizing System involves a collection of resources, and we can treat things, information, and information about things as resources. Every Organizing System involves a choice of properties or principles used to describe and arrange the resources, and ways of supporting interactions with the resources. By comparing and contrasting how these activities take place in different contexts and domains, we can identify patterns of organizing and see that Organizing Systems often follow a common life cycle. We can create a discipline of organizing in a disciplined way.
The concept of the Organizing System highlights the design dimensions and decisions that collectively determine the extent and nature of resource organization, and the capabilities of the processes that compare, combine, transform and interact with the organized resources.
- What Is Being Organized?
- Why Is It Being Organized?
- How Much Is It Being Organized?
- When Is It Being Organized?
- Who (or What) is Organizing It?
In this presentation, I talk about ways to answer these questions that turn a set of resources into an Organizing System. This approach cuts across traditional categories of resource collections; we can describe familiar categories like libraries, museums, and business information systems as design patterns or characteristic configurations of answers to the questions. We can then use these patterns to apply knowledge about familiar domains to unfamiliar ones; someone with a business or informatics background can better understand libraries and museums and have intelligent conversations with librarians and museum curators…and vice versa. We now have a generative, forward-looking framework for organizing any collection of resources—especially those that that don’t fit cleanly into the familiar categories—and we can more easily invent new kinds of interactions for them.
An important benefit of the Organizing System concept is that it treats organizing work done by people and organizing work done by computers as having common goals, despite obvious differences in methods. Instead of a view that contrasts information organization as a human activity and information retrieval as a machine one, or information organization as a topic for library and information science and information retrieval as one for computer science, we can acknowledge that computers now assist people in organizing and that people contribute much of the information used by computers to enable retrieval. In this way the Organizing System framework captures and provides structure for the inherent tradeoffs obscured by the silos of traditional disciplinary and category perspectives: the more effort put into organizing information, the more effectively it can be retrieved, and the more effort put into retrieving information, the less it needs to be organized first.
