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Average Customer Rating:

A chatty introduction to the subject

Customer Rating:

I found this very disappointing. I guess it depends what your expectations are, and I didn't expect what this book delivered. It's chatty, anecdotal, long-winded and theoretical. It reads like the lecture notes for a basic class on information management for general students. I found it long on observation, short on analysis and entirely impractical. This may be what you want, in which case go for it. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely one for the generalist. If you already know anything about classifying information then there'll be little in it that's new except for a few stories. If you are new to the subject and have a train journey to occupy then go for it. If you want a how-to guide then you'd be much better off with Patrick Lambe's book: Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

Lumpers are from Mars and Splitters are from Venus

Customer Rating:

If you don't know what a lumper is, or what a splitter is, you should read this book. In fact, you should read this book anyway - especially if you work in a place with a network drive, do any kind of filing, work with anybody who does any kind of filing. I'm splitting too much. If you store information in any shape or form, then you should read this book. It's fairly obvious that the future will be full of information and data - this books about that and it's good. If you like the sound of this, you might like Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages too.

What a book - it manages to make librarianship interesting!

Customer Rating:

So we have a book that is on the face of it about a very offputting subject - the labels that we put on things. But by the time you have finished reading this tour around the world as we live it - and as we are about to live it, we realise just how important those labels really are. Have you ever thought about how a Staples organises itself? Have you ever thought about where we are going with all these data that we collect about the world? And have you ever wondered how a shopkeeper who owns a store that is apparently complete chaos has gone about sorting everything out? The thing with David Weinberger is that he really knows how to write. These are well chosen examples that have you turning page after page and then thinking about what you have learned for months or even possibly years to come. Put simply, Weinberger knows how to write. One dreads to imagine how a book on this topic might have turned out under the pen of a less gifted author... Let's just say that if you thought about reading The Long Tail, then you definitely should - but you should read Everything Is Miscellaneous first!

Great small work on information organisation

Customer Rating:

This book is really nice as a primer and fresh-up on how information is organized and what it means to us. It explains old organization methods, like the one the libraries use and the organization of organisms that was introduced by Linnaeus. It then compares those 'atom based' organization methods with the new ones we can perform with digital means. Of course Amazon is mentioned where everybody has basically his or her own version of a bookstore. Worth reading if you are interested in taxonomies, ontologies, information organization and categorization.

Great book if you are interested in information

Customer Rating:

I got this book because I saw on a friend's blog she was reading it. It is a great book and I have started citing things from it, for a while I was referring to it as the "book on tagging" but it is much more than that, it talks about the way information is organised and the problems such organisation brings with it. The final words are: "The world won't stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours". I have one gripe with the book it is written from an American point of view and assumes that the reader is also American. For example near the beginning it talks of "the Civil War", now lots of countries have had such strife, England had one back in the 1600s, Spain had one in the 1930s, and there are many others. Not with standing that I do recommend reading it if you have any interest in information and how it is ordered.