The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

1.8. The Concept of “Interactions”

An interaction is an action, function, service, or capability that makes use of the resources in a collection or the collection as a whole. The interaction of access is fundamental in any collection of resources, but many Organizing Systems provide additional functions to make access more efficient and to support additional interactions with the accessed resources. For example, libraries and similar Organizing Systems implement catalogs to enable interactions for finding a known resource, identifying any resource in the collection, and discriminating or selecting among similar resources.20[LIS]

Some of the interactions with resources in an Organizing System are inherently determined by the characteristics of the resource. Because many museum resources are unique or extremely valuable, visitors are allowed to view them but cannot borrow them, in contrast with most of the resources in libraries. A library might have multiple printed copies of Moby Dick but can never lend more of them than it possesses. After a printed book is checked out from the library, there are many types of interactions that might take place—reading, translating, summarizing, annotating, and so on—but these are not directly supported by the library Organizing System and are invisible to it.

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