The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has awarded its 2014 Book of the Year Award to The Discipline of Organizing, by School of Information adjunct professor Bob Glushko.
The Discipline of Organizing offers a framework for the theory and practice of organizing that integrates information organization (IO) and information retrieval (IR), bridging the disciplinary chasms between library and information science and computer science, each of which views and teaches IO and IR as separate topics and in substantially different ways. It introduces the unifying concept of an organizing system — an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support — and then explains the key concepts and challenges in the design and deployment of organizing systems in many domains, including libraries, museums, business information systems, personal information management, and social computing.
The book was written both for classroom use and as a professional reference. It is already in use in undergraduate and graduate courses at over three dozen colleges and universities around the world. Glushko edited the book and authored many of its chapters; additional chapters were written by a range of other authors, including many School of Information alumni and former students of Glushko’s.
Robert Glushko has been an adjunct full professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information since 2002. He has over thirty years of R&D, consulting, and entrepreneurial experience in information systems and service design, content management, electronic publishing, Internet commerce, and human factors in computing systems. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems in 1997, which pioneered the use of XML for electronic business before its 1999 acquisition by Commerce One. In 2008 he co-founded Document Engineering Services, an international consortium of expert consultants in standards for electronic business. He has also served on the boards of directors of OASIS, the Open Data Foundation, and the Robert J. Glushko and Pamela Samuelson Foundation.
The Discipline of Organizing shares the 2014 ASIS&T Book of the Year award with Going Viral by Karine Nahon & Jeff Hamsley. The awards were announced this week at the 77th anual meeting of ASIS&T in Seattle, Washington. On Friday, Glushko and several of his co-authors will be presenting a conference session on teaching information organization using the book and its associated online instructional materials.
