Organizing systems arrange their resources according to many different principles. In libraries, museums, businesses, government agencies and other long-lived institutions, organizing principles are typically documented as cataloging rules, information management policies, or other explicit and systematic procedures so that different people can apply them consistently over time. In contrast, the principles for arranging resources in personal or small-scale organizing systems are not usually stated in any formal way and might even be inconsistent or conflicting.
For most types of resources, any number of principles could be used as the basis for their organization depending on the answers to the “why?” (§1.3.3), “how much?” (§1.3.4), and “how?” (§1.3.6) questions posed in Chapter 1.
A simple principle for organizing resources is collocation — putting them in the same place. However, most organizing systems use principles that are based on specific resource properties or properties derived from the collection as a whole. What properties are significant and how to think about them depends on the number of resources being organized, the purposes for which they are being organized, and on the experiences and implicit or explicit biases of the intended users of the organizing system. The implementation of the organizing system also shapes the need for, and the nature of, the resource properties.45[Cog]
Many resource collections—even very large ones—acquire resources one at a time or in sets of related resources that can initially be treated in the same way. Therefore, it is natural to arrange resources based on properties of individual resources that can be assessed and interpreted when the resource is selected and becomes part of the collection. Decisions about which resource properties will be used in organizing must often precede the creation or collection of the resources. This is especially critical for archaeologists, naturalists, and scientists of every type. Without information about the context of creation or discovery, what might otherwise be important resources could be just a handful of pottery shards, a dead animal, or some random set of bits on a computer.
“Subject matter” organization involves the use of a classification system that provides categories and descriptive terms for indicating what a resource is about. Because they use properties like aboutness that are not directly perceived, methods for assigning subject classifications are intellectually-intensive and require rigorous training to be performed consistently and appropriately for the intended users.46[LIS] Nevertheless, the cost and time required for this human effort motivates many organizing systems for information resources to use computational approaches for arranging them. As computing power steadily increases the bias toward computational organization gets even stronger.
When the resources being arranged are physical or tangible things—such as books, paintings, animals, or cooking pots—any resource can be in only one place at a time in libraries, museums, zoos, or kitchens. Similarly, when organizing involves recording information in a physical medium—carving in stone, imprinting in clay, applying ink to paper by hand or with a printing press—how this information can be organized is subject to the intrinsic properties and constraints of physical things.
The inescapable tangibility of physical resources means that their organizing systems are often strongly influenced by the material or medium in which the resources are presented or represented. For example, museums generally collect original artifacts and their collections are commonly organized according to the type of thing being collected. There are art museums, sculpture museums, craft museums, toy museums, science museums, and so on.
Similarly, because they have different material manifestations, we usually organize our printed books in a different location than our record albums, which might be near but remain separate from our CDs and DVDs. This is partly because the storage environments for physical resources (shelves, cabinets, closets, and so on) have co-evolved with the physical resources they store.47[LIS]
The resource collections of organizing systems in physical environments often grow to fit the size of the environment or place in which they are maintained—the bookshelf, closet, warehouse, library or museum building. Their scale can be large: the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the world’s largest museum and research complex, consists of 19 museums, 9 research facilities, a zoo and a library with 1.5 million books. However, at some point, any physical space gets too crowded, and it is difficult and expensive to add new floors or galleries to an existing library or museum.
Physical resources are often organized according to intrinsic physical properties like their size, color or shape, or intrinsically associated properties such as the place and time they were created or discovered. The shirts in your clothes closet might be arranged by color, by fabric, or style. We can view dress shirts, T-shirts, Hawaiian shirts and other styles as configurations of shirt properties that are so frequent and familiar that they have become linguistic and cultural categories. Other people might think about these same properties or categories differently, using a greater or lesser number of colors or ordering them differently, sorting the shirts by style first and then by color, or vice versa.
In addition to, or instead of, physical properties of your shirts, you might employ behavioral or usage-based properties to arrange them. You might separate your party and Hawaiian shirts from those you wear to the office. You might put the shirts you wear most often in the front of the closet so they are easy to locate. Unlike intrinsic properties of resources, which do not change, behavioral or usage-based properties are dynamic. You might move to Hawaii, where you can wear Hawaiian shirts to the office, or you could get tired of what were once your favorite shirts and stop wearing them as often as you used to.
Some arrangements of physical resources are constrained or precluded by resource properties that might cause problems for other resources or for their users. Hazardous or flammable materials should not be stored where they might spill or ignite; lions and antelopes should not share the same zoo habitat or the former will eat the latter; and adult books and movies should not be kept in a library where children might accidentally find them. For almost any resource, it seems possible to imagine a combination with another resource that might have unfortunate consequences. We have no shortage of professional certifications, building codes, MPAA movie ratings, and other types of laws and regulations designed to keep us safe from potentially dangerous resources.
To overcome the inherent constraints with organizing physical resources, organizing systems often use additional physical resources that describe the primary physical ones, with the library card catalog being the classic example. A specific physical resource might be in a particular place, but multiple description resources for it can be in many different places at the same time.
When the description resources are themselves digital, as when a printed library card catalog is put online, the additional layer of abstraction created enables additional organizing possibilities that can ignore physical properties of resources and many of the details about how they are stored.
In organizing systems that use additional resources to identify or describe primary one’s “adding to a collection” is a logical act that need not require any actual movement, copying, or reorganization of the primary resources. This virtual addition allows the same resources to be part of many collections at the same time; the same book can be listed in many bibliographies, the same web page can be in many lists of web bookmarks and have incoming links from many different pages, and a publisher’s digital article repository can be licensed to any number of libraries.
Organizing systems that arrange digital resources like digital documents or information services have some important differences from those that organize physical resources. Because digital resources can be easily copied or interlinked, they are free from the “one place at a time” limitation.48[Law] The actual storage locations for digital resources are no longer visible or very important. It hardly matters if a digital document or video resides on a computer in Berkeley or Bangalore if it can be located and accessed efficiently.49[Web]
Moreover, because the functions and capabilities of digital resources are not directly manifested as physical properties, the constraints imposed on all material objects do not matter to digital content in many circumstances.50[Com]
An organizing system for digital resources can also use digital description resources that are associated with them. Since the incremental costs of adding processing and storage capacity to digital organizing systems are small, collections of both primary digital resources and description resources can be arbitrarily large. Digital organizing systems can support collections and interactions at a scale that is impossible in organizing systems that are entirely physical, and they can implement services and functions that exploit the exponentially growing processing, storage and communication capabilities available today. This all sounds good, unless you are the small local business with limited inventory that cannot compete with global web retailers that offer many more choices.52[Web]
There are inherently more arrangements of digital resources than there are for physical ones, but this difference emerges because of multiple implementation platforms for the organizing system as much as in the nature of the resources. Nevertheless, the organizing systems for digital books, music and video collections often maintain the distinctions embodied in the organizing system for physical resources because it enables their co-existence or simply because of legacy inertia. As a result, the organizing systems for collections of digital resources tend to be coarsely distinguished by media type (e.g., document management, digital music collection, digital video collection, digital photo collection, etc.).
Information resources in either physical or digital form are typically organized using intrinsic properties like author names, creation dates, publisher, or the set of words that they contain. Information resources can also be organized using extrinsic or behavioral properties like subject classifications, assigned names or identifiers, or even access frequency.53[Com]
Complex organization and interactions are possible when organizing systems with digital resources are based on the data type or data model of the digital content (e.g., text, numeric, multimedia, statistical, geospatial, logical, scientific, or personnel data). These distinctions are often strongly identifiable with business functions: operational, transactional and process control activities require the most fine-grained data, while strategic functions might rely on more qualitative analyses represented in narrative text formats. Managerial and decision support functions might require a mixture of digital content types.
Just as there are many laws and regulations that restrict the organization of physical resources, there are laws and regulations that constrain the arrangements of digital ones. Many information systems that generate or collect transactional data are prohibited from sharing any records that identify specific people. Banking, accounting, and legal organizing systems are made more homogeneous by compliance and reporting standards and rules.
The Domain Name System (DNS)
is the most inherent scheme for organizing web
resources. Top-level domains for countries (.us, .jp, .cn, etc.) and generic
resource categories (.com, .edu. .org, gov, etc.) provide some clues about the
resources organized by a website. These clues are most reliable for large
established enterprises and publishers; we know what to expect at
ibm.com
, Berkeley.edu
, and
sfgov.org
.54[Web]
The network of hyperlinks among web resources challenges the notion of a collection, because it makes it impractical to define a precise boundary around any collection smaller than the complete web.55[Web] Furthermore, authors are increasingly using “web-native” publication models, creating networks of articles that blur the notions of articles and journals. For example, scientific authors are interconnecting scientific findings with their underlying research data, to discipline-specific data repositories, or to software for analyzing, visualizing, simulation, or otherwise interacting with the information.56[Web]
The conventional library is both a collection of books and the physical space in which the collection is managed. On the web, rich hyper linking and the fact that the actual storage location of web resources is unimportant to the end users fundamentally undermine the idea that organizing systems must collect resources and then arrange them under some kind of local control to be effective. The spectacular rise during the1990s of the AOL “walled garden,” created on the assumption that the open web was unreliable, insecure, and pernicious, was for a time a striking historical reminder and warning to designers of closed resource collections until its equally spectacular collapse in the following decade.57[Web] But Facebook so far is succeeding by following a walled garden strategy.
The discipline known as information architecture can be viewed as a specialized approach for designing the information models and their systematic manifestations in user experiences on web sites and in other information-intensive organizing systems.58[IA] Abstract patterns of information content or organization are sometimes called architectures, so it is straightforward from the perspective of the discipline of organizing to define the activity of information architecture as designing an abstract and effective organization of information and then exposing that organization to facilitate navigation and information use.
Our definition of information architecture implies a methodology for the design of user interfaces and interactions that puts conceptual modeling at the foundation, considering presentation or physical design issues afterward. Best practices in information architecture emphasize the use of systematic principles or design patterns for organizing the resources and interactions in user interfaces. The logical design is then translated into a graphical design consisting of arranged windows, panes, menus, and other user interface components.
Many organizing systems need to support interactions to find, identify, and select resources. Some of these systems contain both physical and digital resources, as in a bookstore with both web and physical channels, and many interactions are implemented across more than one device. Both the cross-channel and multiple-device situations create user expectations that interactions will be consistent across these different contexts. Starting with a conceptual model and separating content and structure from presentation, as we discussed in §1.2.3.1, “The Concept of “Organizing Principle””, gives organizing systems more implementation alternatives and makes them more robust in the face of technology diversity and change.
A model-based foundation is also essential in information visualization applications, which depict the structure and relationships in large data collections using spatial and graphical conventions to enable user interactions for exploration and analysis. By transforming data and applying color, texture, density, and other properties that are more directly perceptible, information visualization applications enable people to obtain more information than they can from text displays.60[Cog]
Some designers of information systems put less emphasis on conceptual modeling as an “inside-out” foundation for interaction design and more emphasis on an “outside-in” approach that highlights layout and other presentation-tier considerations with the goal of making interactions easy and enjoyable. This focus is typically called user experience design, and information architecture methods remain an important part of it, but not beginning with explicit organizing principles implies more heuristic methods and yields less predictable results.
Multiple properties of the resources, the person organizing or intending to use them, and the social and technological environment in which they are being organized can collectively shape their organization. For example, the way you organize your home kitchen is influenced by the physical layout of counters, cabinets, and drawers; the dishes you cook most often; your skills as a cook, which may influence the number of cookbooks, specialized appliances and tools you own and how you use them; the sizes and shapes of the packages in the pantry and refrigerator; and even your height.
If multiple resource properties are considered in a fixed order, the resulting arrangement forms a logical hierarchy. The top level categories of resources are created based on the values of the property evaluated first, and then each category is further subdivided using other properties until each resource is classified in only a single category. A typical example of hierarchical arrangement for digital resources is the system of directories or folders used by a professor to arrange his personal document collection in a computer file system; the first level distinguishes personal documents from work-related documents; work is then subdivided into teaching and research, teaching is subdivided by year, and year divided by course. For physical resources, an additional step of mapping categories to physical locations is required; for example, resources in the category “kitchen utensils” might all be arranged in drawers near a workspace, with “silverware” arranged more precisely to separate knives, forks, and spoons.
An alternative to hierarchical organization that is often used in digital organizing systems is faceted classification, in which the different properties for the resources can be evaluated in any order. For example, you can select wines from the wine.com store catalog by type of grape, cost, or region and consider these property facets in any order. Three people might each end up choosing the same moderately-priced Kendall Jackson California Chardonnay, but one of them might have started the search based on price, one based on the grape varietal, and the third with the region. This kind of interaction in effect generates a different logical hierarchy for every different combination of property values, and each user made his final selection from a different set of wines.
Another way to understand faceted classification is that it allows a collection of description resources to be dynamically re-organized into as many categories as there are combinations of values on the descriptive facets, depending on the priority or point of view the user applies to the facets. Of course this only works because the physical resources are not themselves being rearranged, only their digital descriptions.
Chapter 7, “Classification: Assigning Resources to Categories” explains principles and methods for hierarchical and faceted classification in more detail.
[45] [CogSci] See (Barsalou and Hale 1983) for a rigorous contrast between feature lists and other representational formalisms in models of human categories.
[46] [LIS] Libraries and bookstores use different classification systems. The kitchen in a restaurant is not organized like a home kitchen because professional cooks think of cooking differently than ordinary people do. Scientists use the Latin or binomial (genus + species) scheme for identifying and classifying living things to avoid the ambiguities and inconsistencies of common names, which differ across languages and often within different regions in a single language community.
[47] [LIS] Many of the ancient libraries in Greece and Rome have been identified by archaeologists by characteristic architectural features (Casson 2002). See also (Battles 2003).
[48] [Law] In principle, it is easy to make perfect copies of digital resources. In practice, however, many industries employ a wide range of technologies including digital rights management, watermarking, and license servers to prevent copying of documents, music or video files, and other digital resources. The degree of copying allowed in digital organizing systems is a design choice that is shaped by law.
[49] [Web] Web-based or “cloud” services are invoked through URIs, and good design practice makes them permanent even if the implementation or location of the resource they identify changes (Berners-Lee 1998). Digital resources are often replicated in content delivery networks to improve performance, reliability, scalability, and security (Pathan et al. 2008); the web pages served by a busy site might actually be delivered from different parts of the world, depending on where the accessing user is located.
[50] [Computing] Whether a digital resource seems intangible or tangible depends on the scale of the digital collection and whether we focus on individual resources or the entire collection. An email message is an identified digital resource in a standard format, RFC 2822 (Resnick 2001). We can compare different email systems according to the kinds of interactions they support and how easy it is to carry them out, but how email resources are represented does not matter to us and they surely seem intangible. Similarly, the organizing system we use to manage email might employ a complex hierarchy of folders or just a single searchable in-box, but whether that organization is implemented in the computer or smart phone we use for email or exists somewhere “in the cloud” for web-based email does not much matter to us either. An email message is tangible when we print it on paper, but all that matters then is that there is well-defined mapping between the different representations of the abstract email resource.
On the other hand, at the scale at which Google and Microsoft handle billions of email messages in their Gmail and Hotmail services the implementation of the email organizing system is extremely relevant and involves many tangible considerations. The location and design of data centers, the configuration of processors and storage devices, the network capacity for delivering messages, whether messages and folder structures are server or client based, and numerous other considerations contribute to the quality of service that we experience when we interact with the email organizing system.
[51] [Archives] (Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth 2005) and (Leonardi 2010). For example, a “Born-Digital Archives” program at Emory University is preserving a collection of the author Salman Rushdie’s work that includes his four personal computers and an external hard drive. (Kirschenbaum 2008), and (Kirschenbaum et al. 2009).
[52] [Web] For example, a car dealer might be able to keep track of a few dozen new and used cars on his lot even without a computerized inventory system, but web-based AutoTrader.com offered more than 2,000,000 cars in 2012. The cars are physical resources where they are located in the world, but they are represented in the AutoTrader.com organizing system as digital resources, and cars can be searched for using any combination of the many resource properties in the car listings: price, body style, make, model, year, mileage, color, location, and even specific car features like sunroofs or heated seats.
[53] [Computing] Even when organizing principles such as alphabetical, chronological, or numerical ordering do not explicitly consider physical properties, how the resources are arranged in the “storage tier” of the organizing system can still be constrained by their physical properties and by the physical characteristics of the environments in which they are arranged. Books can only be stacked so high whether they are arranged alphabetically or by frequency of use, and large picture books often end up on the taller bottom shelf of bookcases because that is the only shelf they fit. Nevertheless, it is important to treat these idiosyncratic outcomes in physical storage as exceptions and not let them distort the choice of the organizing principles in the “logic tier.”
[54] [Web] The
Domain Name System (DNS)
(Mockapetris 1987) is the
hierarchical naming system that enables the assignment of meaningful
domain names to groups of Internet resources. The responsibility for
assigning names is delegated in a distributed way by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN)
(http://www.icann.org
).
DNS is an
essential part of the Web’s organizing system but predates it by almost
twenty years.
[55] [Web] HTML5 defines a
“manifest” mechanism for making the boundary around a
collection of web resources explicit even if somewhat arbitrary to
support an “offline” mode of interaction in which all
needed resources are continually downloaded (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/browsers.html#offline
),
but many people consider it unreliable and subject to strange side
effects.
[57] [Web] (Munk 2004).
[58] [IA] This definition of information
architecture combines those in a Wikipedia article
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture
)
and in a popular book with the words in its title (Morville and Rosenfield 2006).
Given the abstract elegance of “information”
and “architecture” any definition of “information
architecture” can seem a little feeble.
See (Resmini and Rosati 2011) for a history of information architecture.
[59] [IA] See (Halvorson and Rach 2012), (Tidwell 2008), (Morville and Rosenfield 2006), (Kalbach 2007), (Resmini and Rosati 2011), (Marcotte 2011), (Brown 2010), (Abel and Baillie 2014)
[60] [CogSci] The classic text about information visualization is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Tufte 1983). More recent texts include (Few 2012) and (Yau 2011).