Taxonomy

Documentation that serves multiple purposes

Last week I talked about the taxonomy I created for the philatelic library, and the tension between “aboutness” and “isness.” A question was brought up about filing a piece of ephemera by subject (“aboutness”), and how the patron might not be able to find that ephemera if they were approaching the topic differently, and were …

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Resolving the tension of isness and aboutness

Taxonomies are taxonomies, whether they’re used for physical or digital files. With physical files, unless you photocopy and place an item in multiple folders, there is only one location – one folder – one taxonomy label – to which it belongs. Even if an item is conceptually “about” more than one thing, it only “is” …

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