The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization

The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization is somewhat heavy going, but it’s the definitive work about a lot of areas in information organization. A lot of people encounter information organization issues professionally in the technical fields, but a lot of these issues have been around for ages, appearing in business and libraries for a long period of time.

This book has a huge amount of information in a very small amount of space, and can be somewhat heavy going. It has something to say about almost every issue having to do with organizing information. I also highly advise reading it for anyone in a MLIS/MSIM program, I went and looked this book up today for someone whose class wasn’t reading it for some reason and I advise it highly. It requires an Information Architect or other web designer to be able to think in basic principles about the stuff that they’re doing to be able to use this book — looking for information about controlled vocabularies instead of what the latest buzzword is. However, the payoff from having done so is high due to the clarity of the information presented.

The writing in this book is in the ‘little red schoolhouse‘ academic style from the University of Chicago. I found it very easily digestable and understandable, and it had a profound affect on how I thought about information organization; I credit doing very well in my classes on the subject and being able to speak intelligibly on the subject outside of class to having started out by reading this book. I recommend it highly.