The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

Self-Review

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2.8. Key Points in Chapter Two

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How does a “design questions” or “dimensional” perspective on the design of organizing systems complement the familiar use of categories like library and museum?

A dimensional perspective makes it easier to translate between category- and discipline-specific vocabularies so that people from different disciplines can have mutually intelligible discussions about their organizing activities.

(See §2.1, “Introduction”)

Why is the question “What is a thing?” so fundamental and challenging?

In different situations, the same “thing” can be treated as a unique item, one of many equivalent members of a broad category, or a component of an item rather than as an item on its own.

(See §2.2, “What Is Being Organized?”)

How are organizing systems for physical resources and those for digital resources fundamentally different?

A single physical resource can only be in one place at a time, and interactions with it are constrained by its size, location, and other properties. In contrast, digital copies and surrogates can exist in many places at once and enable searching, sorting, and other interactions with an efficiency and scale impossible for tangible things.

(See §2.2, “What Is Being Organized?”)

Why is it challenging to decide on the ...