Scriveners' Trappings

The Discipline of Organizing is a book, published by the MIT Press that offers a framework for the theory and practice of organizing anything. 
 

A short, 7-page PDF synthesizing and introducing the book main ideas has just been published as part of the latest Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Vol.40- N.1).

The PDF, as well as the book, have been authored by Robert G. Glushko (who teaches in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley) and, as I mentioned, are devoted to introduce the relevance of the TDO (The Discipline of Organizing) to anyone involved in organizing and maintaining content archives or in curating any type of digital content online. 

 From the PDF:

"A set of resources is transformed by an organizing system when the resources are described or arranged to enable interactions with them.

Explicitly or by default, this transformation requires many interdependent decisions about the identities of resources; their names, descriptions and other properties; the classes, relations, structures and collections in which they participate; and the people or technologies that interact with them.

These decisions and the analysis needed to make them have been systematized in The Discipline of Organizing, recently published by MIT Press in both print and eBook formats." 

The PDF provides a good starting point to start asking the right questions needed to develop an organizing framework and to understand why they are so relevant.

"A very practical implication of teaching organizing using more generic concepts and vocabulary is that it enables students to obtain jobs with firms that might not otherwise hire them.

For example, a student who says she knows about curation can’t as easily sell her skillsto a business looking for someone to develop a business continuity plan as one who recognizes that “organizing resources and maintaining them overtime” is the skill the company wants and the one she has."

My comment: Useful for defining an organizing framework for anyone new to doing it. Could be more pragmatic and example-rich.  6/10

Original PDF: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-13/OctNov13_Glushko.pdf 

Book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Discipline-Organizing-Robert-Glushko/dp/0262518503