75 Key Points in Chapter Eleven

What three initial characteristics of an organizing system influence most of the decisions about that organizing system?

Most of the specific decisions that must be made for an organizing system are shaped by the initial decisions about its domain, scope, and scale.

(See “The Organizing System Lifecycle”)

What is the effect of broad scope in an organizing system?

The impact of broad scope arises more from the heterogeneity of the resources and users in a collection rather than from their absolute number.

(See “Scope and Scale of the Collection”)

What is a practical effect of increasing collection size?

Larger collections need more people to organize and maintain them, creating communication and coordination problems that grow much faster than the collection.

(See “Scope and Scale of the Collection”)

How do you avoid problems of scope and scale?

Standardization is the best way to prevent problems of scope and scale.

(See “Scope and Scale of the Collection”)

What is an effect of a heterogeneous user community?

Organizing systems in the same domain and with nominally the same scope can differ substantially in the resources they contain and the interactions they support if they have different categories of users.

(See “Number and Nature of Users”)

How can designers mitigate possible negative consequences of the system and technology they design?

Designers who recognize that their systems have real consequences for people should commit to measures of transparency and an ongoing process of negotiation that enables those affected to voice concerns related to any detrimental effects the technology might have on them and their communities.

(See “Number and Nature of Users”)

What is the single biggest factor affecting the implementation of interactions?

For most organizing systems other than personal ones, the set of interactions that are implemented in an organizing system is strongly determined by economic factors.

(See “Requirements for Interactions”)

What is the most essential requirement of interactions?

An essential requirement in every organizing system is ensuring that the supported interactions can be discovered and invoked by their intended users.

(See “Requirements for Interactions”)

What is the role of computational agents in the creation and consumption of resource descriptions?

Automated and computerized processes can create the resource descriptions in an organizing system and their use is primarily driven by scale.

(See “About the Nature and Extent of Resource Description”)

What is the relationship between organizing principles and resource descriptions?

Organizing principles depend on resource descriptions, so requirements for the former are always intertwined with those for the latter.

(See “About Intentional Arrangement”)

What characteristics of resource descriptions impede growth?

Overly customized and inflexible resource descriptions or arrangements cannot easily accommodate the future growth of the collection.

(See “Designing and Implementing an Organizing System”)

What are the advantages of architectural thinking?

Architectural thinking leads to more modularity and abstraction in design, making it easier to change an implementation to satisfy new requirements or to take advantage of new technologies or procedures.

(See “Architectural Thinking”)

What is big data?

For digital resources, inexpensive storage and high bandwidth have largely eliminated capacity as a constraint for organizing systems, with an exception for big data, which is defined as a collection of data that is too big to be managed by typical database software and hardware architectures.

(See “Architectural Thinking”)

What are the most predictable maintenance activities?

The most predictable maintenance activities for an organizing system with an expected long lifetime are incremental changes in description vocabularies and classification schemes.

Another very predictable type of activity over time with organizing systems is a technology upgrade that improves its quality or capabilities without affecting the organizing principles.

(See “Properties, Principles and Technology Perspective”)

What changes in organizing systems make maintenance especially difficult?

The most challenging kinds of maintenance activities for organizing systems involve changes to the principles for arranging resources along with changes in the implementing technology.

(See “Properties, Principles and Technology Perspective”)

What six questions should be asked when approaching any organizing system?

What resources are being organized? Why are the resources being organized? Who does the organizing? When are the resources organized? Where are the resources organized? How much are the resources organized?

(See the case studies presented in Case Studies)