Competency G: Organizing Information
Demonstrate understanding of basic principles and standards involved in organizing information such as classification and controlled vocabulary systems, cataloging systems, metadata schemas or other systems for making information accessible to a particular clientele.
Introduction to Competency G
I understand this competency as knowing how information is arranged so that a particular group of people can find it. The final phrase of the statement, “for a particular clientele,” is the part I consider most important. An arrangement that is perfectly logical to the person who made it can be unusable to the people it was made for, because they use different words and group things differently.
Joudrey and Taylor (2018) describe the organization of information as a set of related activities: describing an item so that it can be identified, providing access points such as names and subjects, and arranging items in relation to one another through classification. Each activity relies on shared rules. Cataloging standards make one library’s description readable by another. Metadata schemas define which properties of an item are recorded and in what form. Classification places like items together. The rules exist so that a user’s experience of finding something does not depend on which individual did the organizing.
Controlled vocabulary is the principle I have worked with most directly. The national standard for controlled vocabularies lists consistency in describing content and support for retrieval among their purposes (National Information Standards Organization [NISO], 2010). A controlled vocabulary chooses one preferred term for each concept, directs users to that term from its synonyms, and separates words that are spelled alike and mean different things. Without that control, material on one subject is scattered under every word that different authors happened to use, and a search under any single word finds only part of it.
A vocabulary or a classification still has to match the people who use it. Spencer (2009) presents card sorting as a method for learning how people group content and what they call the groups. Participants are given items on cards and asked to sort them into categories that make sense to them. The result shows the designer the mental model of the audience before a structure is imposed on them. Rosenfeld et al. (2015) make labeling one of the core systems of information architecture for the same reason. A label is a promise about what a user will find behind it, and a label written in the organization’s internal language breaks that promise for an outsider.
This competency matters to me because I regularly see the consequences of organization done from the inside out. As volunteer coordinator for the Immersive Learning Research Network I work with a website where the volunteer pages sit under a menu heading that gives a newcomer no hint they are there. The content exists and is accurate, and a new visitor still cannot find it. [Add an example from your AI evaluation work if you have one you can share.]
The competency matters to the profession because organizing information is the work that most clearly distinguishes librarians from other people who handle information. Many professions create content. Few are trained to describe it consistently, relate it to other content, and test whether the arrangement serves its users. As more information is produced and more of it is retrieved by machines, the quality of description and labeling matters more. The evidence below shows me deriving a structure from users’ own groupings, constructing a controlled vocabulary, and organizing a website I built.
Evidence
My preparation for this competency came from INFO 202, Information Retrieval System Design, where I studied controlled vocabularies and metadata, and INFO 251, Web Usability, where I learned card sorting. I applied both in INFO 240, where I built the website described in Evidence 3.
Evidence 1: Usability Practice Activity 3: Card Sorting Study (individual report)
I conducted this study in April 2026 for INFO 251. It examines how a newcomer to the Immersive Learning Research Network would try to get involved through the organization’s website. I documented the existing path a user must follow, wrote 20 cards in plain language to represent the content, and ran an unmoderated hybrid card sort with six participants recruited from outside the organization. In a hybrid sort, participants are offered categories and may also create their own.
The study demonstrates the principle that organization should follow the clientele. The existing site placed volunteer information under a menu labeled “More,” where a new visitor would have no reason to look. In the card sort, the cards describing what volunteering involves and the guide for new volunteers were each placed in the Volunteer category by five of six participants, which was among the strongest agreement in the study. The card on how to become a member was placed under New Member by four participants and under Volunteer by two, which showed that newcomers treat joining and volunteering as closely related. I used cluster diagrams to examine the groupings and then proposed a revised top-level navigation of five items, with a single “Get Involved” entry point. I also stated the limits of the study. Six participants is fewer than the number recommended for firm conclusions, and offering category names may have influenced the sorting. [Before you link this report, correct the passages that describe the supplied categories as chosen “without prompting.”]
Evidence 2: Exercise 2: Vocabulary Design Basics (controlled vocabulary worksheets)
This INFO 202 group exercise required us to build a controlled vocabulary from a set of bibliographic records. [State your role in the group.]
The worksheets demonstrate the steps of vocabulary construction. In the first worksheet we extracted the important concepts from each record. For one article these included “interactive reference,” “web-based interactive reference services,” “reference service,” and “traditional reference services,” which are near-synonyms of the kind a controlled vocabulary exists to manage. In the second worksheet we grouped similar concepts, considered which were significant enough to search by, and selected one preferred term for each group. More than thirty candidate concepts were reduced to a final list of fewer than ten terms. In the third worksheet we indexed each record with three or four terms from that list and checked the assignments against the main concepts of the record. The exercise follows the logic of the national standard: gather the terms authors actually use, choose a single preferred form, and apply it consistently. It also showed me a limit of the method. The instructions called for a final check of term form and alphabetical order, and reviewing our list now I can see that it does not fully meet either, which is a reminder that consistency in a vocabulary has to be verified. [Keep the last sentence only if you agree after checking your original file. This exercise is also used in Competency E.]
Evidence 3: Teleios Commons (26-page website and site inventory)
I built this website in Spring 2026 for INFO 240. It presents an imagined public library and community space called Teleios Commons and is written in PHP with JavaScript. The evidence is the site itself together with the inventory spreadsheet I kept while building it. [Add the link once the site is re-uploaded, and confirm the course title.]
The site has 26 pages. Apart from the home page and the login page, every page sits under one of five menu headings: Explore Collections, Visit, Tech & Making, Programs, and About. The inventory records each page on one row with the same six fields: page title, menu section, file name, description of content, status, and link. A second sheet lists all 82 media files in the same way, giving the page each file belongs to, a description or the prompt used to generate it, and its source. Further sheets record the printable and embedded features and the wireframes.
This artifact demonstrates the competency in two ways. First, the menu is a classification scheme. Each page had to be assigned to one heading, and the headings had to be distinct enough that a visitor could predict where a page would be. Second, the inventory is a small metadata schema. Describing every page and every file with the same fields let me keep track of a site this size, and the file names follow a pattern, with prefixes such as hero, equip, and event that identify the role of each image. The source field records where each image came from, including which were generated with AI tools, which is provenance information that a reader of the site would otherwise not have.
Reviewing the structure now, I can see where the scheme mixes its principles of division. Explore Collections is divided by type of item. Programs is divided partly by audience, with pages for children, teens, and adults, and partly by purpose, with a page for reskilling. Under Visit, the word “location” appears in two page titles. I criticized the same kind of overlap in a public library website in INFO 202, and the card sort method in Evidence 1 is how I would test this menu with real users. [Keep this paragraph only if you agree with it.]
Conclusion
I will apply this competency by testing any structure I design with the people who will use it, and by documenting the terms and rules I choose so that others can apply them consistently. I expect to use it in website and knowledge base work for the organizations I serve and in evaluating how AI systems label and retrieve content. To stay current I will follow NISO for standards, the Library of Congress for developments in subject headings and bibliographic description, and the Information Architecture Conference for practice in organizing digital content. [Add any taxonomy or metadata community you follow.]
References
Joudrey, D. N., & Taylor, A. G. (2018). The organization of information (4th ed.). Libraries Unlimited.
National Information Standards Organization. (2010). Guidelines for the construction, format, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies (ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 [R2010]). https://www.niso.org/publications/ansiniso-z3919-2005-r2010
Rosenfeld, L., Morville, P., & Arango, J. (2015). Information architecture: For the web and beyond (4th ed.). O’Reilly Media.
Spencer, D. (2009). Card sorting: Designing usable categories. Rosenfeld Media.