By Scott Abel | Senior Member
In the digital age, change happens quickly. This column features interviews with the movers and shakers—the folks behind new ideas, standards, methods, products, and amazing technologies that are changing the way we live and interact in our modern world. Got questions, suggestions, or feedback? Email them to scottabel@mac.com.
Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. With a PhD in cognitive psychology from University of California, San Diego as his foundation, Glushko has spent the past 30 years heavily involved in the development of innovative solutions to complex content challenges. He’s worked in corporate research and development, developed a lucrative career as a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and spent the last decade pushing the envelope in academia, cranking out super-savvy information technologists and content experts from one of the most prestigious universities on the planet. He’s an experienced expert in both information systems and service design, a content management maven, and an innovator in the digital publishing arena. He’s also co-author of Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services, and the principal author of The Discipline of Organizing, named an Information Science Book of the Year in 2014 by the Association of Information Science and Technology.
In this edition of Meet the Change Agents, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, interviews Glushko about the importance of thinking about organizing as a discipline and the lessons he learned from his research on the subject.
SA: You recently wrote a book called The Discipline of Organizing. Why did you pick the topic of organizing for the subject of your work?
RG: At Berkeley, I teach in the School of Information, and most people react to that by thinking “isn’t every school a school of information?” or they otherwise express some puzzlement at the name. Many former library schools have recognized the need to broaden themselves to include business and entrepreneurial contexts of information design and use, as well as the need to embrace technology. “Information School” emerged as a brand for this new focus (see ischools.org/). The iSchools often define themselves as “the intersection of information, technology, and people,” which is pretty unspecified. If you push for a better explanation you might get “the intersection of library science, computer science, business, user experience design, law, and other fields that care about information, technology, and people. “ But that doesn’t actually explain what you study if you attend an Information School.
So one day I started asking, “what exactly is at that intersection of these different disciplines?” People acted like it was a crazy question, which was probably because no one had ever asked it before, which meant it was important and not crazy to ask it. I decided that the answer was that all the disciplines in some way were about how to organize things, information or people, so their intersection was the discipline of organizing.
SA: What types of roles did you study and what were the folks in these roles in charge of organizing?
RG: Every purposeful activity involves the organization of resources and the organization of the people who create, arrange, and use them. Library and information science has traditionally studied the organization of documents, books, and other information resources from a public sector perspective, paying careful attention to user requirements for access and preservation, and offering prescriptive methods and solutions for bibliographic description and classification. Computer science and informatics disciplines study the organization of information and computing resources in the context of information-intensive business applications. These fields emphasize process efficiency, system architecture, and implementation. Business people, especially in the context of strategy and operations, work to organize the resources in their supply and distribution channels, their information exchanges with potential and existing customers, and the people who work to plan and operate the business.
And of course, as individuals we organize our own stuff, and many of us have a lot of tangible and intangible stuff to organize.
SA: What commonalities in the way people organize things did you discover amongst all the roles studied?
RG: No matter what we’re organizing, there are some common activities, or a common life cycle: We select the resources to organize; we arrange them according to some set of principles, which themselves are based on properties of the resources; we design interactions with the resources that are made possible by the way we arranged them; and we maintain the resources and their arrangements over time. We do these activities informally when we’re organizing something like our clothes closet or kitchen, but they are very formal and explicit when we’re organizing a library, content management system, or scientific data repository.
SA: What differences did you discover in the way people organize things?
RG: It is easy to find differences, especially when you analyze how individuals organize. The goals that people have for organizing depend on how they want to interact with the resources they organize and the way they prioritize those interactions. This is easiest to see when you’re organizing tangible resources like organizing your clothes closet. Some people separate their “work clothes” from their “play clothes.” Some people separate their shirts from their pants, while some people arrange thing in complete outfits. Some people sort by seasons, and others by color.
There are also differences when you look at the organizing done by companies or institutions. Even though they are both organizing books, there are obvious differences when you compare the organization of libraries to bookstores, and similar contrasts can be seen when you compare museums to art galleries, scientific data repositories to business information systems, and so on. And think about how you might arrange the different categories of food in a cafeteria buffet; if you’re trying to get school kids to eat healthier, you put the fat and sugar foods in hard to reach places; if you’re trying to save money at an all-you-can-eat place, you put the cheap salads at the beginning and the expensive foods at the end of the line.
But more fundamental to the idea that there is a discipline of organizing, sometimes there seem to be differences when there are, in fact, similarities. Often there are different words for essentially the same activities: adding a resource to a library collection is called “acquisition,” adding to a museum collection is called “accessioning,” adding to an archive is “ingesting,” and adding to a business information system might be called “integration.” These vocabulary differences obscure the commonalities and make it hard for people to communicate across their traditional industry boundaries.
SA: You introduce the concept of an “organizing system” in the book. What are organizing systems?
RG: An organizing system is “an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support.” I hope you can see that this definition fits everything from libraries, museums, zoos, and data warehouses, to closets and kitchens … and leaves out the Grand Canyon, which exhibits a lot of arrangement in its geology, but it wasn’t intentional.
SA: Some of the articles in this issue of Intercom focus on curation; what did you learn about curation? How do you define it and are there different types?
RG: As I mentioned earlier, different domains sometimes use the same terms to describe activities that are more similar than you see at first glance. I see “curation” as a close neighbor to preservation, governance, and storage—all of which concern the maintenance of resources over time. So curation takes place at a personal scale when we rearrange a bookshelf to accommodate new books or create new file folders for this year’s health insurance claims. It occurs at an institutional scale when a museum designs a new exhibit or a zoo creates a new habitat, and at Web scale when people select photos to upload to Flickr or Instagram, and then tag or “Like” those uploaded by others.
book cover
I’ve noticed that “curation” tends to be a more common term in contexts where cultural, historic, or scientific artifacts are being maintained and have some intrinsic value, as in libraries, museums, data archives or other so-called “memory institutions.” In contrast, people say “governance” in contexts where the resources are maintained because they are essential in running a business, but have no intrinsic value. For example, businesses collect and preserve information about employees, inventory, orders, and invoices, because it ensures internal goals of efficiency, revenue generation, and competitive advantage. No one would say that some particular invoice or customer record was valuable in its own right, so they aren’t “curated.” Instead, we’d talk about “data governance” policies that would cover things like the collection, retention, or non-retention of personal information and business records. I’ve also noticed that that people who have professional training as curators really hate it when people who don’t have that training use “curation” to refer to their websites, social media sharing, or personal collections of some type of thing or another.
SA: What other lessons did you learn while writing about organizing that were surprising or at least not predictable until you took a closer look?
RG: I have come to dislike the term “metadata.” It is often given the useless definition of “data about data” when “data about things” is also metadata, as is “textual description about things.” What is metadata for you might not be the data for me, and vice versa. My favorite example is in fantasy sports, where the “players” on fantasy teams are composed of the data produced by the actions of real players on real teams. So I talk in terms of “primary resources” and “description resources” instead of “data” and “metadata.”
And something can be a resource and a description resource at the same time. Think of a concert ticket. It is package of assertions about an event—its title, time, location, cost, and so on—so it is a description resource, like a card in a library card catalog. A concert ticket is also a resource in its own right, with intrinsic value; it can be bought and sold, sometimes for a greater price than its resource description specifies. After the event, the ticket loses its intrinsic value, but might acquire extrinsic value as a different type of resource in a collection of concert tickets that reminds you of the event long afterward.
I’ve also been surprised and amused to see how often people in ordinary language muddle the distinction between a thing—an instance of some resource—and the class of resources to which it belongs. People say that two things are the same when what they really mean is that they are instances of the same class of things. I like to ask students if they’ve ever seen “Shamu” at Sea World because most of them have. Then I ask them when and at which Sea World, because there are several of them. They laugh when they get it that “Shamu” is a brand name given to the star Orca at each Sea World park, and when they recall that it was back in 1999 that they saw him, they realize that that particular Shamu is certainly not the same one performing today.
SA: Talk to us about the book and tell us what makes The Discipline of Organizing more than just a book?
RG: A book with the ambitious goal of defining a new discipline must be broad enough to include all the disciplines that contribute to the “transdiscipline” that emerges at their intersection. But it must treat each contributing discipline with enough depth so that the new concepts of the emergent discipline can be re-applied meaningfully to discipline-specific concepts and examples. These two requirements to make the book both broad and deep would have made it bloated and hard to understand as a textbook, if we hadn’t come up with some innovations in book design and implementation.
So we wrote the book with a core text that is supplemented by about 600 notes, typically a paragraph in length, each of which is identified by discipline. In addition, we label about 15% of the chapter content, especially examples and sidebars, as being focused on disciplinary-specific rather than transdisciplinary content. This content model turns the source files for our book into a “family of books” whose common core is extended by discipline-specific content. We then can build any particular book by filtering the content based on the values of the disciplinary attributes in our source files.
If that isn’t clear, consider how a single automobile production line can support the assembly of thousands of customized variations of a car model. What we’ve done is to develop analogous “production-line” techniques for single-source publishing.
This novel book architecture has made it possible for the book to serve as a primary or supplemental text in more than 50 courses in 18 countries in information organization, knowledge management, digital collections, information architecture, information systems design, and other fields that differentially emphasize the contributing disciplines around the core idea of organizing resources. The book was chosen as an Information Science Book of the Year in 2014—in part because of its combination of intellectual and design innovations.
SA: Thanks for sharing your expertise with our readers. I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to help us understand the discipline of organizing.
RG: You’re welcome, Scott. Thanks for inviting me to participate and to share what I’ve learned. I hope the audience finds value in this interview.
SA: Where can folks learn more about your work and read the book online?
RG: At http://disciplineoforganizing.org, you can learn more about the book, and you can freely download six chapters from the first edition (2013). You can also read about the enhanced eBook editions we published last year. We can’t give those away yet, but they’re inexpensive and you can better appreciate the idea of a core text enhanced by disciplinary-specific content with the eBooks.
