Know Your Weird: The Organization of Information

The cover of The Organization of Information, Fourth Edition, by Daniel N. Joudrey and Arlene G. Taylor, published by Libraries Unlimited in 2018. Part of the Library and Information Science Text Series. This is the paperback edition (ISBN 978-1-59884-858-8), but also available in hardcover (ISBN 978-1-59884-859-5) and ebook (ISBN 978-1-4408-6129-1).

As you may have noticed from our past posts, we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library of Literary Eccentricities & Rarities aren’t just about reading books, but a much broader curiosity about all things bookish and even book adjacent. It also shows in the range of bookish things we have done and continue to do outside of our library’s virtual walls: English student, production assistant, newspaper editor, book fair coordinator, publicist, book seller, designer, writer, textual editor, literary editor, author, conference organizer, book bloggers, and most recently, literary agent and student librarian.

In the spirit of that curiosity, I thought I’d share a quick photo or two of one of my current active reads, The Organization of Information, Fourth Edition, by Daniel N. Joudrey and Arlene G. Taylor.

You know you must be a bit of an information nerd when chapter headings like “Introduction to Metadata”, “Encoding Standards”, and “Systems for Categorization” constitute reading both exciting and engrossing. But then again I also read manuals cover-to-cover, so know your weird I guess would be the message. A friend recently used the term “data-curious” to describe this orientation to life, which works remarkably well on so many levels.

One of my favourite quotes from the book so far is this, highlighted in the pink:

It reads “Metadata is a love-letter to the future” (Joudrey and Tayler, page 186).

One practical offshoot of this reading is a side project that we will share more about in a future post, so stay tuned. [ update: learn more about the project in this post! ]

But in the meantime, next time you find someone reorganizing their spice rack or sorting their shoe collection, you can ask them “so, have you read Joudrey & Taylor?”

Or don’t. Like I said, know your weird.

Happy Organizing!

– Winston

Get your very own copy of The Organization of Information from your local Canadian indie bookseller!