Richard Saul Wurman's LATCH model proposes five ways of organizing information: Location (organizing by place, atlases, travel sites, real estate, location-aware apps), Alphabet (useful for large collections with no other suitable organizing principle, such as dictionaries and directories, especially when the audience doesn't share a common understanding needed for other modes), Time (organizing by chronology, historical timelines, TV guides, calendars, step-by-step instructions), Category (grouping similar or related items, which requires that the audience shares an understanding of what the categories mean), and Hierarchy (ordering items by importance or value, like the most popular products or the cheapest flights).
The source material is candid that LATCH, while a useful quick-reference model, is "excessively prescriptive." There are more ways to organize information than these five modes. And Wurman's fifth mode is a particular source of confusion: he originally called it "continuum," which described its actual meaning, ordering by degree or value, far better than the word he settled on, "hierarchy," chosen mainly so the acronym would work. That's a different, narrower meaning than the structural-pattern sense of hierarchy covered earlier in this chapter, and conflating the two can cause real confusion.
LATCH is a genuinely useful checklist for a first pass at organizing information: it's just not the last word on the subject, and its own fifth letter doesn't mean what you'd assume.
1: Location. Organizing by geographical region of discovery is a direct match for LATCH's Location mode.
2: Time. Browsing by century is chronology-based organization, matching the Time mode.
3: Alphabet. Looking up a known item by name, alphabetically, matches the Alphabet mode.
4: Hierarchy. Ranking by popularity or engagement is Wurman's ordinal sense of hierarchy, ordering by value or importance, not the structural-pattern meaning of hierarchy covered earlier in this chapter.
Cultural theme grouping, burial practices, trade, religious ritual, doesn't map cleanly onto any of LATCH's five modes. It's closest to Category, but LATCH's Category mode as described is a fairly general notion of grouping similar or related items, not the kind of curated, subject-matter-expert-driven thematic grouping a museum curator would actually want to create. This is exactly the limitation the source material calls out directly: there are more ways of organizing information than LATCH's five modes account for.Forcing every organizational need into one of the five LATCH letters can obscure the right structure rather than clarify it. LATCH works well as a starting checklist for a first pass at organizing information, it isn't an exhaustive framework, and a museum's curatorial thematic scheme is a good example of a genuinely useful organizing principle that falls outside it.