The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

8.4. Worlds of Description

In the previous two sections we have considered descriptions as designed objects with particular structures and as written documents with particular syntaxes. As we have seen, there are many possible choices of structure and syntax. But these choices are never made in isolation. Just as an architect or designer must work within the constraints of the existing built environment, and just as any author must work with existing writing systems, descriptions are always created as part of a pre-existing “world” over which any one of us has little control.

In the final part of this chapter, we will consider how choices of structure and syntax have converged historically into broad patterns of usage. For lack of a better term, we call these broad patterns “worlds.” “World” is not a technical term and should not be taken too literally: the broad areas of application sketched here have considerable overlap, and there are many other ways one might identify patterns of description structure and syntax. That said, the three worlds described here do reflect real patterns of description form that influence tool and technology choices. In your own work creating and managing resource descriptions, it is likely that you will need to think about how your descriptions fit into one or more of these worlds.

8.4.1. The Document Processing World

The first world we will consider is concerned primarily with the creation, processing and management of hybrid narrative-transactional ...