Afterword

We have reached the end of this book, but we are just at the beginning of “the discipline of organizing.” We hope that we have demonstrated why thinking of the art and science of organizing in a more abstract way can enable communication and cooperation across the numerous disciplines that are concerned with organizing, especially library and information science, computer science, informatics, law, economics, and business. Instead of just appropriating concepts and methods from these fields, we have tried to unify them, filling in the gaps between their complementary perspectives to yield a more comprehensive and generative understanding of how they fit together.

Now it is your turn. Perhaps you have a job in one of the fields we have brought together that involves organizing resources of one type or another. After reading this book, you surely will not approach that work the same way you did before. You will be able to apply the design patterns and principles of The Discipline of Organizing to make your existing organizing systems more capable, and will be able to create entirely new ones that fill the white space between the traditional categories.

We encourage people who read this book to contribute their own case studies at DisciplineOfOrganizing.org, and we expect to incorporate the most interesting and entertaining ones into this collection.