The Discipline of Organizing: Core Concepts Edition, 3rd Edition

2.3. Organizing Resources

Organizing systems arrange their resources according to many different principles. In libraries, museums, businesses, government agencies and other long-lived institutions, organizing principles are typically documented as cataloging rules, information management policies, or other explicit and systematic procedures so that different people can apply them consistently over time. In contrast, the principles for arranging resources in personal or small-scale organizing systems are not usually stated in any formal way and might even be inconsistent or conflicting.

Property

In this book we use property in a generic and ordinary sense as a synonym for feature or “characteristic.” Many cognitive and computer scientists are more precise in defining these terms and reserve property for binary predicates (e.g., something is red or not, round or not, and so on). If multiple values are possible, the property is called an attribute, “dimension,” or “variable.”

For most types of resources, any number of principles could be used as the basis for their organization depending on the answers to the “why?” (§1.3.3), “how much?” (§1.3.4), and “how?” (§1.3.6) questions posed in Chapter 1.

A simple principle for organizing resources is collocation — putting them in the same place. However, most organizing systems use principles that are based on specific resource properties or properties derived from the collection as a whole. What properties are significant and how to think about ...