Desktops, metadata and filing

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In 1973 Xerox PARC released the “Alto” personal computer. This was the first machine to boast a graphical user interface (GUI). To lessen the cognitive burden on users — then still bowler-hatted civil servants and sleeve-gatored clerks used to an analogue world in which mailroom boys ran written memoranda in reusable manila envelopes between in-trays and out-trays, and “information technology” meant a Lamson Pneumatic Tube System for sending documents invoices around the organisation by a sort of commercial version of a mortar — the designers at Xerox PARC created the metaphor of the “desktop”.

On the screen in front of you was a literal desktop with folders, blotter, filing cabinets, and even a dinky little wastebasket.

This was a nice, quaint idea but it has utterly outlived its purpose and now forces people into idiotic filing practices.

Because the thing is, folks, information in the physical world and information In the digital world are very different propositions indeed. You would think it would go without saying but does not: physical information, in the real world, can only be in one place at one time. Your filing system reflects this: there is a unique physical location for any single document. So do filing methodologies: older readers may remember the Dewey decimal system which categorised the entire field of non-fiction wisdom by number.

If the same document needs to be categorised in different ways this can only be achieved by duplicating it. In the physical realm, duplication was slow, imperfect and expensive and so, limited. At the time this seemed to be a drawback; with hindsight, it appears a valuable discipline.

In the digital world, the physical aspect of a document — its “substrate” — is to all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The expression this document is not worth the paper it is written on has lost its meaning because the document being the digital content embedded on the paper is the part that has value; the paper is an inconvenient imposition of physical analogue reality. In the digital realm that inconvenient imposition has gone: a “document” is nothing more that an information string: more or less costless to generate, transport, replicate and store. By simply appending metadata to such a document, it can be categorised in as many different ways, and stored in as many different places, as takes your fancy.

A better metaphor than a desktop here is a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is ofcourse a rudimentary form of a database

Indeed the imperative is to ensure that a single document is not unnecessarily duplicated but is instead assigned metadata properties by which it can be categorised and therefore positioned in the digital firmament.

SharePoint gets a lot of hate from people who don’t use it properly. To be sure, Microsoft has not made the job of learning how to use it easy — Microsoft’s design decisions across its platform are pretty weird, so we should not be surprised — but here is a basic rule of thumb:

In SharePoint you organise by metadata, not by folders.

Folders are top-down. Metadata is bottom-up. Folders prefer form over substance. Metadata prefers substance over form.

Folders

Folders are very old economy. The folder metaphor is, literally, based on physical artefacts that can only be in one place at any time. If I put this item in the “Litigation” folder, I can’t also put it in the “Knowledge Management” folder.

Where the same unitary item deserves to be in both folders, I must therefore duplicate it. Where it is a “living thing” plotting its own miserable trajectory through the cosmos — a contract under negotiation, or a periodically updated legal template for example — then duplicating it is a bummer. It duplicates the manual task of updating all copies of the document as it changes, and that introduces the opportunity for human error. There may be miskeys. A document may be forgotten. Version control is a pain.

Also your preferred hierarchy can change, as personnel, business priorities, or circumstances change. Changing your hierarchy means completely re-engineering your folder structure.

So: a folder structure assumes a single hierarchy and multiple copies of each item.

Metadata

Metadata looks at the world the other way up. It says, “let there be a single canonical item, and multiple hierarchies.” Metadata allows you to non-destructively add hierarchies as you please. The more metadata fields you have, the more possible hierarchies there are. Unused hierarchies are almost costless.

Excel is a, well, excellent tool for managing metadata: Each row is an item and each column is a metadata point. You can add additional columns as you see fit without impacting what is already there: newly added columns are non-destructive as they augment without affecting existing ones.

In Excel you can filter sort and pivot by reference to any column in a table, in any order, and in doing so you impose a dynamic hierarchy on the items in the list. This is the magic of metadata.

SharePoint allows you to do exactly the same thing with a document library.

We intuitively understand the power of metadata when we are presented with a spreadsheet. But the same power does not occur to us when we are presented with SharePoint, even though it is, in essence, a supercharged online spreadsheet.

It is as if we take a preconceived notion of a physical library with us, and ignore our understanding of spreadsheets.

See also

• Metadata