The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

2.5. When Is It Being Organized?

“Because bibliographic description, when manually performed, is expensive, it seems likely that the ‘pre’ organizing of information will continue to shift incrementally toward ‘post’ organizing.”

—(Svenonius 2000, p. 194-195)

The organizing system framework recasts the traditional tradeoff between information organization and information retrieval as the decision about when the organization is imposed. We can contrast organization imposed on resources “on the way in” when they are created or made part of a collection with “on the way out” organization imposed when an interaction with resources takes place.

When an author writes a document, he or she gives it some internal organization via title, section headings, typographic conventions, page numbers, and other mechanisms that identify its parts and relationship to each other. The document could also have some external organization implied by the context of its publication, such as the name of its author and publisher, its web address, and citations or links to other documents or web pages.

Digital photos, videos, and documents are generally organized to some minimal degree when they are created because some descriptions, notably time and location, are assigned automatically to these types of resources by the technology used to create them. At a minimum, these descriptions include the resource’s creation time, storage format, and chronologically ordered, auto-assigned filename (IMG00001.JPG, IMG00002.JPG ...