The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

Acknowledgments

Robert J. Glushko

Philosophers, scientists, designers, and many others have sought to make sense of how we organize our physical and intellectual worlds for over two thousand years. We owe a great general obligation to all of them, so we dedicated this book to them. However, it is more important to acknowledge more specifically the people who made The Discipline of Organizing happen. I think it is befitting of a book about organizing to be organized in making these acknowledgments, as follows in three categories:

The Motivators

Annalee Saxenian, the Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, challenged me in 2005 to teach the “Information Organization and Retrieval” course required of all entering graduate students and provided me with a supportive environment in which to do it. The lecture notes of my predecessors, Berkeley colleagues Marti Hearst, Ray Larson, and Mark Davis, provided important intellectual scaffolding as I developed my own syllabus and lectures.

When I discovered the little red book by Elaine Svenonius, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, my mind opened up to library and information science. I aspired to write a book that could build on and broaden those foundations to connect with my own background in cognitive and computer science. A few months later when I met Elaine I was very pleased when she endorsed this ambitious effort.

I have been continually encouraged by faculty members and deans whenever I talked about this ...