Help me organize our files?

December 30, 2009 7:34 AM

How should I organize all the assets and files for my non-profit's Internet team?

I am staring at a folder that contains 10 gigs (13k files) on our organization's "X Drive" ... I'm looking for a file that might be called, "changes." It might be an Excel spread or it might not.

HA HA HA.

We have two websites and assets on a shared drive -- the HTML, images, Word DOCs, PDFs, XLSs, and PPTs of which are all over the place. My predecessors have organized things by folders titled after their names, projects, events, acronyms, file type, file uses, concepts, with and without spaces or underscores or hyphens.

What should I do? My director must have things organized in folders so Basecamp is out. Pretty sure I can't group things by file type so not sure where to go next.

I used to work at places where this kind of behavior was forbidden. Previously, I have worked with a file organization structure like:

site
- assets
- - excel spreads
- - pdfs
- - psds
- - word docs
- html
- - assets
- - - css
- - - images
- - - - follows online page structure
- - - scripts
- - html files
- - - follows online page structure, obviously


Wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of "how to organize your Internet team's files." Any other structure ideas that might be conducive to the act of organizing or agreeable to team members who don't like to think about this stuff?

posted by metajc to Work & Money (3 answers total)

Well, this is definitely in the spirit of "pointing you in the direction". You will likely want to do some searching around for terms such as "taxonomy + assets" or "DAM" (Digital Asset Management).

There are entire businesses based on the organization of assets, so it's a pretty big question with a lot of variables. If you don't know the above terms hopefully that's a good start.
posted by jeremias at 10:20 AM on December 30, 2009

There's a million ways to go about this and to do it right, even with simple directors, let alone DAM, we'd need to know about the documents themselves. You can't expect strangers on the intertubes to help you organize your documents without knowing the contents. To get you in the right frame of mind, look up things like card sorting.

I would not in a million years create a directory structure that sorted files by file type. You can easily run a search for an xls document, a pdf document, etc. So you're going to create an organizational structure to present information to you in a way that you can simply query right now? No.
posted by Brian Puccio at 4:18 PM on December 30, 2009

try this:

Karen's Directory Printer : works great at printing information from drives, great thing is
- it is free software

I suggest exporting the information from this csv file into an excel spreadsheet, and it will give you a good overview of your files.
posted by MechEng at 10:07 AM on March 2, 2010