freeform
People have been organizing information for almost as long as they have been creating it. Ever since we learned that we could expand our memory and productivity by storing some pieces of information in the physical world – notching a stick to mark the passage of time, painting on a wall to tell a story, or knotting a rope to keep track of inventory – we have been accumulating bits and pieces of parchment, paper, and stone. The flipside of this is that as these things accumulated, we had to figure out somewhere to put them, and we had to do so in such a way that we could find them later. Externalization and organization go hand in hand; it doesn’t do much good to record something for later if we aren’t going to be able to find it when we need it.
Our early efforts at information technology evolved quickly, and we developed ever more sophisticated methods to aid us in the organization of our physical bits and pieces of information. We learned to identify the relevant attributes of each piece of information – who created it? what is it called? when was it created? what is it about? – and we created standards for ordering according to these attributes. We standardized the alphabet and the calendar, and we started to think hierarchically in order to reduce the number of feasible options at each stage of classification.
We built libraries, designed catalog systems, and started to see literacy as a skill worth spreading to every man, woman, and child.
Today, we all learn basic principles of organization – keep like things together
it is still beyond most of our capabilities, however, to organize an entire library. advances in organization have relied heavily on the work of librarians and scholars to annotate, update,
digital information makes things different
library and information professionals still have work to do, but we are no longer only keeping track of information that can be traced back to a discrete physical thing.
we are no longer just interested in the characteristics of the information in the public domain.
once i am able to have my own copy of a piece of information, the potential number of relevant attributes balloons.
we are all, in effect, keeping track of our own library.
and the ways that we use the information is changing.
all of our separately maintained piles of information become interlinkable, and the benefits of doing so are rather high.
we can all become librarians of our own information – the semantic web vision
we can continue to have different levels of organization for different kinds of information – professionally maintained libraries and catalogs, and our own stuff
we can build classification into our everyday interactions
haystack is about building collections, but still views these collections as aggregations of bits that are “located” elsewhere
it still sees place as separate from categorization
it is time-consuming