The Organization of Information

This book is informative without being a difficult read. The chapters are broken down into easy to manage sections. The author frequently uses acronyms common in the information field, but she also provides definitions. This work is definitely a keeper in my reference library.

This is an excellent textbook. It is well organized and clearly written, explaining difficult concepts in understandable language for students. It covers the history of information organization in libraries, archives, and museums, as well as tools such as inventories, bibliographies, catalogs and indexes, and methods and standards of codification; reviews the history and development of the internet; describes different kinds of databases; and discusses metadata as a theoretical and practical concept, reviewing different kinds of metadata schemes. I highly recommend it.

The organization of information is an on-going process that has taken centuries of study and ingenuity. Tools such as catalogs, museum registers, bibliographies, and indexes are making progressions each day.

I used this book for an introductory lesson on descriptive cataloguing in library, archival and information science. It worked very well for giving an overview of the problems in just this interdisciplinary approach. A lot of examples are given and explained in an understandable way. There are some reduncancies but this helps for the understanding.

The customer who said that "Library of Congress Subject Headings are presented as a thesaurus" in this book is incorrect. Three kinds of controlled vocabulary are presented and distinctions are made among them. Thesauri are clearly distinguished from subject heading lists, and Library of Congress Subject Headings are presented under the subheading "Subject Heading Lists."