Selection, organizing, interaction design, and maintenance activities occur in every organizing system.

(See §3.1, “Introduction”)

These activities are not identical in every domain, but the general terms enable communication and learning about domain-specific methods and vocabularies.

(See §3.1, “Introduction”)

The most fundamental decision for an organizing system is determining its resource domain, the group or type of resources that are being organized.

(See §3.2, “Selecting Resources”)

Memory institutions select rare and distinctive resources, but in scientific research, a sample must contain representative instances.

(See §3.2, “Selecting Resources”)

Even when the selection principles behind a collection are clear and consistent, they can be unconventional, idiosyncratic, or otherwise biased.

(See §3.2.1, “Selection Criteria”)

If you can determine where the resources come from, you can make better selection decisions by evaluating the people, processes, and organizing systems that create them.

(See §3.2.2, “Looking “Upstream” and “Downstream” to Select Resources”)

In this book we use property in a generic and ordinary sense as a synonym for feature or “characteristic.” Many cognitive and computer scientists are more precise in defining these terms and reserve property for binary predicates (e.g., something is red or not, round or not). If multiple values are possible, the property is called an attribute, “dimension,” or “variable.”

(See §3.3, “Organizing Resources”)

Most organizing systems use principles that are based on specific resource properties or properties derived from the collection as a whole.

(See §3.3, “Organizing Resources”)

Some arrangements of physical resources are constrained or precluded by resource properties that might cause problems for other resources or for their users.

(See §3.3.1.1, “Organizing with Properties of Physical Resources”)

There are always multiple interpretations of the sensory stimuli gathered by our visual system, but the mind imposes the simplest ones: things near each other are grouped, complex shapes are viewed as simple shapes that are overlapping, missing information needed to see separate visual patterns as continuous or whole is filled in, and ambiguous figure-ground illusions are given one interpretation at a time.

(See the sidebar, Gestalt Principles)

Built environments can be designed to encourage or discourage interactions between people, to create a sense of freedom or confinement, to reward exploration or enforce efficiency.

(See §3.3.2.2, “Organizing Built Environments”)

It is straightforward from the perspective of the discipline of organizing to define the activity of information architecture as designing an abstract and effective organization of information and then exposing that organization to facilitate navigation and information use.

(See §3.3.3.2, ““Information Architecture” and Organizing Systems”)

An emerging issue in the field of digital humanities is the requirement to recognize the materiality of the environment that enables people to create and interact with digital resources

(See §3.3.3, “Organizing Digital Resources”)

The level of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio) of data determines how much quantitative organization of your data will be sensible.

(See §3.3.4, “Organizing With Descriptive Statistics”)

Statistical descriptions summarize a set of resources, and reveal other details that enable comparison of instances with the collection as a whole (such as identifying outliers).

(See §3.3.4, “Organizing With Descriptive Statistics”)

Multiple properties of the resources, the person organizing or intending to use them, and the social and technological environment in which they are being organized can collectively shape their organization.

(See §3.3.5, “Organizing with Multiple Resource Properties”)

The tradeoff between the amount of work that goes into organizing a collection of resources and the amount of work required to find and use them is inescapable when the resources are physical objects or information resources are in physical form.

(See §3.4.1, “Affordance and Capability”)

The concept of affordance, introduced by J. J. Gibson, then extended and popularized by Donald Norman, captures the idea that physical resources and their environments have inherent actionable properties that determine, in conjunction with an actor’s capabilities and cognition, what can be done with the resource.

(See §3.4.1, “Affordance and Capability”)

A resource is only accessible when it supports interactions, and it is ineffective design to implement interactions with resources that some people are unable to perform.

(See §3.4.1, “Affordance and Capability”)

Many of the techniques for making a resource accessible involve transforming the resource or its description into a different form so someone who could not perceive it or interact with it in its original form can now do so.

(See §3.4.1, “Affordance and Capability”)

With digital resources, the essence of the interaction is information exchange or symbolic manipulation of the information contained in the resource.

(See §3.4.2.2, “Value Creation with Digital Resources”)

The variety and functions of interactions with digital resources are determined by the amount of structure and semantics represented in their digital encoding, in the descriptions associated with the resources, or by the intelligence of the computational processes applied to them.

(See §3.4.2.2, “Value Creation with Digital Resources”)

Preservation of resources means maintaining them in conditions that protect them from physical damage or deterioration.

(See §3.5.2, “Preservation”)

Preservation is often a key motive for digitization, but digitization alone is not preservation.

(See §3.5.2.1, “Digitization and Preserving Resources”)

The essence of curation and governance is having clear policies for collecting resources and maintaining them over time that enable people and automated processes to ensure that resource descriptions or data are authoritative, accurate, complete, consistent, and non-redundant.

(See §3.5.3, “Curation” and §3.5.4, “Governance”)

Data cleaning algorithms can eliminate duplicate data, search engines can improve the relevance of results using selection and navigation behavior, and sensor data can predict when machines need servicing.

(See §3.5.3.4, “Computational Curation”)

An essential part of maintenance is the phasing out of resources that are damaged or unusable, expired or past their effectivity dates, or no longer relevant to any interaction.

(See §3.5.3.5, “Discarding, Removing, and Not Keeping”)

Governance is essential to deal with frequent changes in business organizing systems, data quality management, access control to ensure security and privacy, compliance, deletion, and archiving.

(See §3.5.4.1, “Governance in Business Organizing Systems”)

Scientific data poses special governance problems because of its scale.

(See §3.5.4.2, “Governance in Scientific Organizing Systems”)