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

10.6. Operating and Maintaining an Organizing System

After the organizing system has been designed and implemented it can be put into its operation and maintenance phases. We will look at these from two perspectives, first from the point of view of individual resources, and then from the point of view of the organizing system’s design and implementation. These two perspectives are not always clearly distinguished. Curation, for example, is often used to describe actions taken to maintain individual resources as well as those that result in new arrangements of them.

10.6.1. Maintaining an Organizing System: Resource Perspective

Sometimes an organizing system is implemented with its organizing structures and relationships waiting to be populated by resources as they are acquired and described. The scope and scale of the organizing system shapes how the descriptions are created and how the descriptions are then used to assign resources to the logical or physical containers of the organizing system. The most important decisions to be made at this point involve determining an appropriate mix of methods for creating the resource descriptions, because their cost, quality, consistency, completeness, and semantic richness depends on which human or computational agents do the work (§4.3.6).

For web-based and consumer-focused organizing systems, it is tempting to rely on users to assign descriptions, tags, or ratings to resources (§4.2.2.3). Some of these systems attempt to improve the quality ...