The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

2.3. Why Is It Being Organized?

“The central purpose of systems for organizing information [is] bringing like things together and differentiating among them.”

—(Svenonius 2000 p. xi)

Almost by definition, the essential purpose of any organizing system is to describe or arrange resources so they can be located and accessed later. The organizing principles needed to achieve this goal depend on the types of resources or domains being organized, and in the personal, social, or institutional setting in which organization takes place.

Organizing systems can be distinguished by their dominant purposes or the priority of their common purposes. Libraries, museums, and archives are often classified as memory institutions to emphasize their primary emphasis on resource preservation. In contrast, “management information systems” or “business systems” are categories that include the great variety of software applications that implement the organizing systems needed to carry out day-to-day business operations.

“Bringing like things together” is an informal organizing principle for many organizing systems. Almost as soon as libraries were invented over two thousand years ago, the earliest librarians saw the need to develop systematic methods for arranging and inventorying their collections.26[LIS] The invention of mechanized printing in the fifteenth century, which radically increased the number of books and periodicals, forced libraries to begin progressively more refined efforts to state the functional ...