Resource > Robert J. Glushko

The Discipline of Organizing

We organize things. We organize information, information about things, and information about information. Organizing is how we create understanding.

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The Discipline of Organizing synthesizes insights from library science, information science, computer science, cognitive science, systems analysis, business, and other disciplines to create an Organizing System for understanding organizing. To help us organize information, information about things, and information about information.

This framework is robust and forward-looking, enabling effective sharing of insights and design patterns between disciplines that weren't possible before.

This award-winning and widely adopted text includes content to bridge between the foundations of organizing systems and the new statistical and computational techniques of data science. Because at its core, data science is about how resources are described and organized. It reframes descriptive statistics as organizing techniques, expands the treatment of classification to include computational methods, and incorporates many new examples of data-driven resource selection, organization, maintenance, and personalization.

This edition remains the definitive source for practitioners.


Robert J. Glushko is an information scientist and author who defined the unifying framework “discipline of organizing”.

Robert J. Glushko
Robert J. Glushko

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