The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

2.6. Key Points in Chapter Two

• Selection, organizing, interaction design, and maintenance activities occur in every organizing system.

  (See §2.1, “Introduction”)

• These activities are not identical in every domain, but the general terms enable communication and learning about domain-specific methods and vocabularies.

  (See §2.1, “Introduction”)

• Adding a resource to a library collection is called acquisition, but adding to a museum collection is called accessioning.

  (See §2.1, “Introduction”)

• The most fundamental decision for an organizing system is determining its resource domain, the group or type of resources that are being organized.

  (See §2.2, “Selecting Resources”)

• Even when the selection principles behind a collection are clear and consistent, they can be unconventional, idiosyncratic, or otherwise biased.

  (See §2.2.2, “Selection Principles”)

• 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.”

  (See §2.3, “Organizing Resources”)

• Most organizing systems use principles that are based on specific resource properties or properties derived from the collection as a whole.

  (See §2.3, “Organizing Resources”)

• There are a huge number of ways to organize people that differ ...