Information Representation
Week 7: Organization of Information
February 17 and 19

Remember:

Assignment 2 is due on Thursday February 19.
Let's be sure we are clear on the two parts of assignment 2

Let's take a minute to catch our breaths and figure out where we are on our "course trajectory"

(what's an information bearing entity?)

The six activities of info org (by Hagler via Taylor)

1. Identifying the existence of "information bearing entities" (publicity and sunshine)
2. Identifying the "works" contained within the IBEs (here's that content again)
3. Systematically collecting IBEs (emphasis on systematic) (here's aggregation again)
4. Producing lists of IBEs as required  (big or small; on-demand or at collection level)(and here's aggregation again, too)
5. Providing access to IBEs by key points (such as name, title, subject, etc.)
6. Providing the means of locating IBEs (or copies)

We do in fact organize "information" (books on shelves, defrag hard drive, database records)

But we more frequently work with the surrogates.

As you already know :-), a variety of online resources do in fact organize information. If they didn't, they be awfully hard to use. This is what you found in part 3 of assignment 1.

When you use an information resource, you tend to go with questions (tacit or explicit) ...

Info org is what lets you answer the questions.

Vitamin C [supplement]	plastic bottle	500 mg tablets of ascorbic acid
Back in Black [CD]	CD with jewel case	play the CD to listen to music performed by AC/DC	??
Stonewall's Jerquee [snack]	plastic packet	vegetarian "jerky"	??
3.5" floppy disk [media]	Sylvester disk	plastic disk; file contents	??

This table leaves out a lot that we talked about, and only has the form and content

Attributes such as publisher, length, date, author, designer, artist, writer, creator, seller, size, have been left off.

What can we say about this collection, based on what we've written down for form? For content?

Works cited:
Hagler, R. (1997). The bibliographic record and information technology. 3rd ed. Chicago: American Library Association.
Taylor, A. G. (1999). The organization of information. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

The O'Connor reading notes from last week.
This week's reading  is:
Rosenfeld, Louis & Morville, Peter. (1998). “Organizing information.” Chapter 3 in their Information architecture for the World Wide Web. pp. 22-46. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. (book at Goldstein Reserves)