The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

2.4. How Much Is It Being Organized?

“It is a general bibliographic truth that not all documents should be accorded the same degree of organization.”

—(Svenonius 2000, p. 24)

Not all resources should be accorded the same degree of organization. In this section we will briefly unpack this notion of degree of organization into three important and related dimensions: the amount of description detail or organization applied to each resource, the amount of organization of resources into classes or categories, and the overall extent to which interactions in and between organizing systems are shaped by resource description and arrangement.

It is important to note that this section is not asking the question “how much stuff is being organized?” but rather to what degree is the stuff being organized. Another way to ask the same question is “how many organizing principles are at work?” in this organizing system. Your closet might be arranged only by body part covered and season; an online music store will organize resources by genre, artist name, band name, album name, popularity, date released, and maybe others. So we would say that the online music store is organized much more than the closet, because more organizing principles are at work.

(Chapter 5 and Chapter 7, more thoroughly address these questions about the nature and extent of description in organizing systems.)

Not all resources in a collection require the same degree of description for the simple reason we discussed in §2.3, “Why ...