It seems obvious that information professionals do not organize information for the simple pleasure of doing so. We organize with a purpose and for a reason. Arlene Taylor, in her book The Organization of Information (2004), discusses the two primary reasons we organize information: retrieval and posterity.
Information, in-and-of itself, isn't useful until someone wants to retrieve it and put it to some use. Organizing information for the purpose of retrieval is called "bibliographic control" (Greer, Grover, Fowler, 2007, p. 64). The reasons a person may want to retrieve a bit of information are as varied as information itself, but information professionals have to anticipate what information their clients may want to retrieve and organize it in such a way as to be easily accessible to those clients.
Similarly, we may organize information for purposes of posterity. There may be no immediate need for the information, but again, we anticipate a future desire to retrieve this information. Museums, archives, and libraries have recognized this need and have stored information for posterity for many years (Taylor, 2004).
4 comments:
I really agree with what you said about why professionals organize information. We need to be sure to have it organized wether or not the user is looking for it. Can you imagine a library that was unorganized. I wouldn't want to go there. I don't think that I would ever be able to find what I need in order to complete assingments as well as read for my own enjoyment.
Organization is definitely a need and user-driven task. Beyond the library, information architecture speaks to the need for organization, mostly of websites, for multiple purposes.
RE Tamu
Have you checked out Gould's Book Arcade in Australia? Many of the books there are unorganized. Ironically, I first read about it when I took an information architecture class: Morville, P. & Rosenfeld, L. (2007) Information architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly.
Information without organization is a real problem and if the scheme of the organization is not known then it doesn't help much. One of the problems with searching on Google, etc. is that it is not really organized in a useful way. You have to input the right search terms to get possible sites but then you have to sort through those results to find reliable inforamtion. While they do "organize" with how often key words appear that does not sort by what is relevant or irrelevant information.
Organizing for posterity is part of the question of preserving too. As Kate says there may be no immediate need for the information and it may not even seem important to preserve at the time but in the future it could become very important.
Sharon, I appreciate your comment. I agree that the patron/clients' knowledge of the organizational system is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Information can be as organized as possible, but if those who want to retrieve it don't know the system, it still isn't useful. I see this all the time with my students. We use the Dewey Decimal System in our libraries, but, without some instruction, students have no idea what those call numbers mean.
I'm glad you brought this up.
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