Resource has an ordinary sense of anything of value that can support goal-oriented activity. This definition means that a resource can be a physical thing, a non-physical thing, information about physical things, information about non-physical things, or anything you want to organize. Other words that aim for this broad scope are entity, object, item, and instance. Document is often used for an information resource in either digital or physical format; artifact refers to resources created by people, and asset for resources with economic value.

Resource has specialized meaning in Internet architecture. It is conventional to describe web pages, images, videos, and so on as resources, and the protocol for accessing them, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), uses the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).5[Web]

Treating as a primary resource anything that can be identified is an important generalization of the concept because it enables web-based services, data feeds, objects with RFID tags, sensors or other smart devices, or computational agents to be part of Organizing Systems.

Instead of emphasizing the differences between tangible and intangible resources, we consider it essential to determine whether the tangible resource has information content—whether it needs to be treated as being “about” or representing some other resource rather than being treated as a thing in itself. Whether a book is printed or digital, we focus on its information content, what it is about; its tangible properties become secondary. In contrast, the hangars in our closet and the measuring cups in our kitchen are not about anything more than their obvious utilitarian features, which makes their tangible properties most important. (Of course, there is no sharp boundary here; you can buy “fashion hangers” that make a style statement, and the old measuring cup could be a family memento because it belonged to Grandma).

Many of the resources in Organizing Systems are description resources or surrogate resources that describe the primary resources; library catalog entries or the list of results in web search engines are familiar examples. In museums, information about the production, discovery, or history of ownership of a resource can be more important than the resource; a few shards of pottery are of little value without these associated information resources. Similarly, business or scientific data often cannot be understood or analyzed without additional information about the manner in which they were collected.

Resources that describe, or are associated with other resources are sometimes called metadata. However, when we look more broadly at Organizing Systems, it is often difficult to distinguish between the resource being described and any description of it or associated with it. One challenge is that when descriptions are embedded in resources, as metadata often is—in the title page of a book, the masthead of a newspaper, or the source of web pages—deciding which resources are primary is often arbitrary. A second challenge is that what serves as metadata for one person or process can function as a primary resource or data for another one. Rather than being an inherent distinction, the difference between primary and associated resources is often just a decision about which resource we are focusing on in some situation. An animal specimen in a natural history museum might be a primary resource for museum visitors and scientists interested in anatomy, but information about where the specimen was collected is the primary resource for scientists interested in ecology or migration.

Organizing Systems can refer to people as resources, and we often use that term to avoid specifying the gender or specific role of an employee or worker, as in the management concept of the “human resources” department in a workplace. A business is defined by its intentional arrangement of human resources, and there is both variety and regularity in these arrangements (see the sidebar, Business Structures in §5.5). In addition, groups of people have come together to form "intentional communities" for thousands of years in monasteries, communes, artist colonies, cooperative houses, and religious or ethnic enclaves so they can live with people who share their values and beliefs.5a[Phil]

The shift from a manufacturing to an information and services economy in the last few decades has resulted in greater emphasis on intellectual resources represented in skills and knowledge rather than on the natural resources of production materials and physical goods.6[Bus]

Human resources in organizing systems can be understood much the same way as inanimate physical or digital resources: they are selected, organized, and managed, and can create value individually or through their interactions with others inside and outside of the system. However, human beings are uniquely complicated resources, and any organizing system that uses them must take into account their rights, motivations, and relationships. (See the sidebar, People as Resources.)

A collection is a group of resources that have been selected for some purpose. Similar terms are set (mathematics), aggregation (data modeling), dataset (science and business), and corpus (linguistics and literary analysis).

We prefer collection because it has fewer specialized meanings. Collection is typically used to describe personal sets of physical resources (my stamp or record album collection) as well as digital ones (my collection of digital music). A collection can contain identifiers for resources along with or instead of the resources themselves, which enables a resource to be part of more than one collection, like songs in playlists.

A collection itself is also a resource. Like other resources, a collection can have description resources associated with it. An index is a description resource that contains information about the locations and frequencies of terms in a document collection to enable it to be searched efficiently.

Because collections are an important and frequently used kind of resource, it is important to distinguish them as a separate concept. In particular, the concept of collection has deep roots in libraries, museums and other institutions that select, assemble, arrange, and maintain resources. Organizing Systems in these domains can often be described as collections of collections that are variously organized according to resource type, author, creator, or collector of the resources in the collection, or any number of other principles or properties. In business contexts, the use of "collection" to describe a set of resources is much less common, but businesses organize many types of resources, including their employees, suppliers, customers, products, and the tangible and intangible assets used to create the products and run the business. Indeed, a business itself can sometimes be abstractly described as a collection of resources, especially when the resources are software components or services. (See the sidebar, Library {and, or, vs.} Business Organizing Systems and endnote40[Com].)

Intentional arrangement emphasizes explicit or implicit acts of organization by people, or by computational processes acting as proxies for, or as implementations of, human intentionality. Intentional arrangement is easiest to see in Organizing Systems created by individual people who can make all the necessary decisions about organizing their own resources. It is also easy to see in Organizing Systems created by institutions like libraries, museums, businesses, and governments where the responsibility and authority to organize is centralized and explicit in policies, laws, or regulations.

However, top-down intentionality is not always necessary to create an Organizing system. Organization can emerge over time via collective behavior in situations without central control when decisions made by individuals, each acting intentionally, add up over time. Organizing systems that use bottom-up rather than top-down mechanisms are sometimes called self-organizing, because they emerge from the aggregated interactions of actors with resources or with each other. Self-organizing systems can change their internal structure or their function in response to feedback or changed circumstances.

This definition is broad enough to include business and biological ecosystems, traffic patterns, and open-source software projects. Another good example of emergent organization involves path systems, where people (as well as ants and other animals) take advantage of and thereby reinforce the paths taken by their predecessors. When highly orderly and optimal arrangements emerge from local interactions among ants, bees, birds, fish, and other animal species, it is often called “swarm intelligence.”6a[Com] When this happens with human ratings for news stories, YouTube videos, restaurants, and other types of digital and physical resources we call it “crowdsourcing”. What the animal and human situations have in common is that information is being communicated between individuals. Sometimes this communication is direct, as when Amazon shows you the average rating for a book or what books have been bought by people like you. At other times the communication is indirect, achieved when the agents modify their environment (as they do when they create paths) and others can respond to these modifications. Adam Smith's “invisible hand” is another example where individuals collectively generate an outcome they did not directly intend but that arose from their separate self-interested actions in the marketplace.6b[Cog] 6c[Com] 6d[Bus] Likewise, even though there is no top-down organization, the web as a whole, with its more than a trillion unique pages, is a self-organizing system that at its core follows clear organizing principles.7[Web] 7a[IA]

Self-organizing is also used to describe phenomena like climate, neural networks, and phase transitions and equilibrium states in physics and chemistry. But when systems involve collections of inanimate resources that are very large and open, with complex interactions among the resources, it seems less sensible to attribute intentional arrangement to the outcomes. The resource arrangements that emerge cannot always be interpreted as the result of intentional or deterministic principles and instead are more often described in probabilistic or statistical terms. And even though it involves animate resources, Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” in evolutionary biology is a self-organizing mechanism where intentionality is hard to pinpoint or absent entirely.

The requirement for intentional arrangement excludes naturally occurring patterns created by physical or geological processes from being thought of as Organizing Systems. There is information in the piles of debris left after a tornado or tsunami and the strata of the Grand Canyon. But they are not Organizing Systems because the patterns of arrangement were created by deterministic natural forces rather than by agents following one or more organizing principles.

Other patterns of resource arrangements are illusions or perceptions that require a particular vantage point. The best examples are patterns of stars as they appear to an observer on Earth. The three precisely aligned stars that are often described as “Orion’s belt” are several hundred light years from Earth and also from each other. The perceived arrangement of the stars is undeniable, but the stars are not aligned in the universe. On the other hand, astronomical constellations like Orion are intentional arrangements imposed on the perceived locations of the stars, and these perceived arrangements and the explanations for them that constellations provide form an Organizing System that is deeply embedded in human culture and in the important practice of navigation, especially over the seas.

Taken together, the intentional arrangements of resources in an Organizing System are the result of decisions about what is organized, why it is organized, how much it is organized, when it is organized, and how or by whom it is organized (each of these will be discussed in greater detail in §1.3, “Design Decisions in Organizing Systems”). An Organizing System is defined by the composite impact of the choices made on these design dimensions. Because these questions are interrelated their answers come together in an integrated way to define an Organizing System.

1.2.3.1. The Concept of “Organizing Principle”

The arrangements of resources in an Organizing System follow or embody one or more organizing principles that enable the Organizing System to achieve its purposes. Organizing principles are directives for the design or arrangement of a collection of resources that are ideally expressed in a way that does not assume any particular implementation or realization. We call this design philosophy “Architectural Thinking” (See also §10.5.2, “Architectural Thinking”.)

When we organize a bookshelf, home office, kitchen, or the MP3 files on our music player, the resources themselves might be new and modern but many of the principles that govern their organization are those that have influenced the design of Organizing Systems for thousands of years. For example, we organize resources using easily perceived properties to make them easy to locate, we group together resources that we often use together, and we make resources that we use often more accessible than those we use infrequently. Very general and abstract organizing principles are sometimes called design heuristics (e.g., “make things easier to find”). More specific and commonly used organizing principles include alphabetical ordering (arranging resources according to their names) and chronological ordering (arranging resources according to the date of their creation or other important event in the lifetime of the resource). Some organizing principles sort resources into pre-defined categories and other organizing principles rely on novel combinations of resource properties to create new categories.

Expressing organizing principles in a way that separates design and implementation aligns well with the three-tier architecture familiar to software architects and designers: user interface (implementation of interactions), business logic (intentional arrangement), and data (resources). (See the sidebar, The Three Tiers of Organizing Systems.)

The logical separation between organizing principles and their implementation is easy to see with digital resources. In a digital library it does not matter to a user if the resources are stored locally or retrieved over a network. The essence of a library Organizing System emerges from the resources that it organizes and the interactions with the resources that it enables. Users typically care a lot about the interactions they can perform, like the kinds of searching and sorting allowed by the online library catalog. How the resources and interactions are implemented are typically of little concern. Similarly, many email applications have migrated to the web and the system of filters and folders that manage email messages is no longer implemented in a local network or on personal computers, but most people neither notice nor care.

The separation of organizing principles and their implementation is harder to recognize in an Organizing System that only contains physical resources, such as your kitchen or clothes closet, where you appear to have unmediated interactions with resources rather than accessing them through some kind of user interface or “presentation tier” that supports the principles specified in the “middle tier” and realized in the “storage tier.” As a result, people can easily get distracted by presentation-tier concerns. Too often we waste time color-coding file folders and putting labels on storage containers, when it would have better to think more carefully about the logical organization of the folder and container contents. It does not help to use colors and labels to make the logical organization more salient if that is not well designed first.

One place where you can easily appreciate these different tiers for physical resources is in the organization of spices in a kitchen. Different kitchens might all embody an alphabetic order organizing principle for arranging a collection of spices, but the exact locations and arrangement of the spices in any particular kitchen depends on the configuration of shelves and drawers, whether a spice rack or rotating tray is used, and other storage-tier considerations. Similarly, spices could be logically organized by cuisine, with Indian spices separated from Mexican spices, but this organizing principle does not imply anything about where they can be found in the kitchen.

Figure 1.2, “Presentation, Logic and Storage Tiers.” illustrates the separation of the presentation, logic, and storage tiers for four different types of library Organizing Systems and for Google Books. No two of them are the same in every tier. Note how a library that uses inventory robots to manage the storage of books does not reveal this in its higher tiers. (See the sidebar, Library Robot.)

Figure 1.2. Presentation, Logic and Storage Tiers.

It is highly desirable when the design and implementation of an Organizing System separates the storage of the resources from the logic of their arrangement and the methods for interacting with them. This three-tier architect is familiar to designers of computerized Organizing Systems but it is also useful to think about Organizing Systems in this way even when it involves physical resources.

Because tangible things can only be in one place at a time, many Organizing Systems, like those in the modern library with online catalogs and physical collections, resolve this constraint by creating digital proxies or surrogates to organize their tangible resources, or create parallel digital resources (e.g., digitized books).9[Web] The implications for arranging, finding, using and reusing resources in any Organizing System directly reflect the mix of these two embodiments of information; in this way we can think of the modern library as a digital Organizing System that primarily relies on digital resources to organize a mixture of physical and digital ones.

[9][Web] Instead of thinking of a digital book as a “parallel resource” to a printed book, we could consider both of them as alternate representations of the same abstract resource that are linked together by an “alternative” relationship, just as we can use the HTML ALT tag to associate text with an image so its content and function can be understood by text-only readers.

The Organizing System for a small collection can sometimes use only the minimal or default organizing principle of collocation—putting all the resources in the same container, on the same shelf, or in the same email in-box. If you do not cook much and have only a small number of spices in your kitchen, you do not need to alphabetize them because it is easy to find the one you want.10[Com]

[10][Com] For collections of non-trivial size the choice of searching or sorting algorithm in computer programs is a critical design decision because they differ greatly in the time they take to complete and the storage space they require. For example, if the collection is arranged in an unorganized or random manner (as a “pile”) and every resource must be examined, the time to find a particular item increases linearly with the collection size. If the collection is maintained in an ordered manner, a binary search algorithm can locate any item in a time proportional to the logarithm of the number of items. Analysis of algorithms is a fundamental topic in computer science; a popular textbook is Introduction to Algorithms by (Cormen et al. 2009).

Some organization emerges implicitly through a frequency of use principle. In your kitchen or clothes closet, the resources you use most often migrate to the front because that is the easiest place to return them after using them. But as a collection grows in size, the time to arrange, locate, and retrieve a particular resource becomes more important. The collection must be explicitly organized to make these interactions efficient, and the organization must be preserved after the interaction takes place; i.e., resources are put back in the place they were found. As a result, most Organizing Systems employ organizing principles that make use of properties of the resources being organized (e.g., name, color, shape, date of creation, semantic or biological category), and multiple properties are often used simultaneously. For example, in your kitchen you might arrange your cooking pots and pans by size and shape so you can nest them and store them compactly, but you might also arrange things by cuisine or style and separate your grilling equipment from the wok and other items you use for making Chinese food.

Unlike those for physical resources, the most useful organizing properties for information resources are those based on their content and meaning, and these are not directly apparent when you look at a book or document. Significant intellectual effort or computation is necessary to reveal these properties when assigning subject terms or creating an index.

The most effective Organizing Systems for information resources often are based on properties that emerge from analyzing the collection as a whole. For example, the relevance of documents to a search query is higher when they contain a higher than average frequency of the query terms compared to other documents in the collection, or when they are linked to relevant documents. Likewise, algorithms for classifying email messages continuously recalculate the probability that words like “beneficiary” or “Viagra” indicate whether a message is “spam” or “not spam” in the collection of messages processed.

An interaction is an action, function, service, or capability that makes use of the resources in a collection or the collection as a whole. The interaction of access is fundamental in any collection of resources, but many Organizing Systems provide additional functions to make access more efficient and to support additional interactions with the accessed resources. For example, libraries and similar Organizing Systems implement catalogs to enable interactions for finding a known resource, identifying any resource in the collection, and discriminating or selecting among similar resources.12[LIS]

Some of the interactions with resources in an Organizing System are inherently determined by the characteristics of the resource. Because many museum resources are unique or extremely valuable, visitors are allowed to view them but cannot borrow them, in contrast with most of the resources in libraries. A library might have multiple printed copies of Moby Dick but can never lend more of them than it possesses. After a printed book is checked out from the library, there are many types of interactions that might take place—reading, translating, summarizing, annotating, and so on—but these are not directly supported by the library Organizing System and are invisible to it.

For works not in the public domain, copyright law gives the copyright holder the right to prevent some uses, but at the same time “fair use” and similar copyright doctrines enable certain limited uses even for copyrighted works.13[Law]

Digital resources enable a greater range of interactions than physical ones. Any number of people or processes can request a weather forecast from a web-based weather service because the forecast is not used up by the request and the marginal cost of allowing another access is nearly zero. Furthermore, with digital resources many new kinds of interactions can be enabled through application software, web services, or application program interfaces (APIs) in the Organizing System. In particular, translation, summarization, annotation, and keyword suggestion are highly useful services that are commonly supported by web search engines and other web applications. Similarly, an Organizing System with digital resources can implement a “keep everything up to date” interaction that automatically pushes current content to your browser or computing device.

But just as technology can enable interactions, it can prevent or constrain them. If your collection of digital resources (ebooks or music, for example) is not stored on your own computer or device, a continuous Internet connection is a requirement for access. In addition, access control policies and digital rights management (DRM) technology can limit the devices that can access the collection and prevent copying, annotation and other actions that might otherwise be enabled by the fair use doctrine.

Interaction design is especially crucial for managing resources that have the capability to initiate interactions with each other or with external agents. Consider the vast differences in how workers behave in businesses organized according to principles of scientific management and those that embody the Kaizen principles of continuous improvement. In the former, work is highly standardized and bureaucratic, giving workers little autonomy. In the latter, work is also standardized, but workers are motivated to analyze and improve work processes whenever possible, and they are given great discretion in how to do that.13a[Bus]

Just as with organizing principles, it is useful to think of interactions in an abstract or logical way that does not assume an implementation because it can encourage innovative designs for Organizing Systems. (See the sidebar, The Global Digital Zoo.)