International Society For Knowledge Organization Research Articles

From words to actions: assessing the impact of antiracist declarations in library and information science

The aims of this paper are to reaffirm calls for the global elimination of racism in library and information science, to specify ways of making progress towards such elimination, and to indicate how to assess the extent to which the declarations made by international bodies have had an impact on the success of antiracist strategies in which library and information science professionals engage at the local level. A review is undertaken of the declarations on racism made by the United Nations (UN), and by two professional organisations: the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO). A case study approach is then taken in identifying antiracist strategies in library and information science in the United States. International declarations on racism are numerous and expansive, and are suggestive of several important categories of antiracist strategy. A means of assessing the relationship between declarations and strategies is proposed. It is concluded that the impact of declarations has not been substantial. Affirmative action policies, hate speech bans, reparative taxonomies, and actions decentring whiteness are few and far between in library and information science. Renewed effort should be made to engage in antiracist strategies of the kinds promoted in the declarations.

Eduard Rubenovich Sukiasyan — Erudition, Efficiency, Courage

The article is devoted to the memories of the talented work of Eduard Rubenovich Sukiasyan (1937—2021) — the greatest library scientist in Russia, one of the developers and later Editor-in-Chief of the Library Bibliographic Classification (LBC). The author traces his professional path as prominent theorist and practitioner of librarianship. The article presents information about the work of E.R. Sukiasyan in the V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR (now the Russian State Library, RSL), as well as the compiler and member of the Editorial Board of the “Dictionary of Library Terms”. The author considers his contribution to the reorganization of the RSL system of catalogues as the Head of the Department of systematic and subject catalogues. Eduard Rubenovich enjoyed the well-deserved love of students of the Academy of Retraining of Workers of Art, Culture and Tourism. E.R. Sukiasyan was an active participant in the public library movement, the member of the Council of the Russian Library Association. He made great contribution to the activities of the International Society for Knowledge Organization, as well as to the work of the Classification and Indexing Section of the International Federation of Library Organisations and Institutions. E.R. Sukiasyan is the author of over one thousand scientific papers.

Two national classification systems – of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of Korea

The purpose of the article is to provide general background information about two national classification systems (CS), about which there have been practically no publications in Russian professional literature. The author gives the definition of national CS, adopted by the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) and talks about the typology categories of CS. The first part considers the Library Classification of the People's Republic of China (CLC). The history of its creation, the available variants and publications are sequentially analized. The distribution boundaries of CLC are shown, its structure and features are considered. CLC is a completely original system created by Chinese experts. The second part of the article analyzes the Decimal Classification of the Republic of Korea (KDC). Widespread in the world of DDC schedules were taken as the basis of the KDC many years ago. Some of the main classes were used unchanged, while others were completely rearranged so that Korea and Korean language were in the first places in the schedules. Similar changes were made to the religion class. KDC has only one option (the last 6th edition is in 3 volumes). It is considered national, but not used in all scientific libraries in South Korea. Knowledge of the classification practices of foreign countries is an indisputable indicator of our classification culture.

Ingetraut Dahlberg (1927-2017)

Dr. Ingetraut Dahlberg essentially introduced and shaped the term “knowledge organization.” She also was the main engine in the founding of the scientific associations Society for Classification and International Society for Knowledge Organization as well as the journals International Classification and Knowledge Organization. In 2017, Ingetraut Dahlberg died at the age of ninety years. Some life data and scientific contributions are presented here.

A Formal Taxonomy of Knowledge Organization: Meta-Analysis and Facet Analysis

Nearly fifty years after the incorporation of the International Society for Knowledge Organization and the introduction of its formal scientific journal Knowledge Organization, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the domain appeared. The practice of domain analysis for knowledge organization, twenty years after its introduction as a core methodology, has created the largest corpus of theoretical knowledge in the domain analysis of knowledge organization itself. A substantial body of research data, therefore, is available in the corpus of articles and conference papers reporting on the epistemological and ontological pillars of the science of knowledge organization. This paper is a report on the evolution of a formal taxonomy of knowledge organization, which is a product of an exhaustive meta-analysis of the KO domain. Our team compiled the corpus of twenty-nine formal published analyses together with key formative historical documents. We then analyzed the corpus thematically, bibliographically, and using co-word analysis to extract key concepts and the underlying faceted conceptual infrastructure. The taxonomy itself is faceted and is linked where possible to published definitions in the KO literature and as well as to the online ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization. A dynamic project, the taxonomy will be maintained as linked open data and will grow as emergent research contributes new concepts or generates new facets.

International Society for Knowledge Organization. Forty years of cooperation

The experience of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), its tasks, current status, and main activities are discussed. The initiative of establishing ISKO belongs to Ingetraut Dahlberg, its first president. The part Russia takes in ISKO and that of the Russian ISKO section are discussed.The author analyzes the ISKO portal structure, the content of its main divisions illuminating the mission, elected bodies, its history, national sections, events in reversed chronology, and publications. The international Encyclopedia is one of the dynamic ISKO projects and a nonexhaustive digital resource; the entry on the Russia’s national classification system, namely BBK (Library Bibliographic Classification) was added to the Encyclopedia in 2017. The history of the project and the difficulties of editing text for foreign users are discussed. The information and scientific importance of publishing the BBK entry in ISKO Encyclopedia is stressed.The author concludes that, to cooperate efficiently with foreign colleagues, ISKO has to publish books, textbooks, monographs both in the Russian and English languages and to participate in IFLA activities.

Information-documentation building in the francophone area: report from the 11e Colloque international d’ISKO-France 2017

This paper presents the memories of the 11e Colloque international d’ISKO-France 2017. From the report of the conferences, sessions and the problematizations made throughout the event, it demonstrates the importance of Francophone thinkers to the construction of information-documentation. The experience has provided a space for exchanges between researchers from many countries, as well as highlighting the diversity of topics and approaches that are transversal to the Knowledge Organization (KO). The contributions of the colloquium should not be interpreted in a linear way, but rather in a temporal and associative way. In order to do so, it is essential for the KO to consider the historical path that precedes it in order to formulate an interdisciplinary strategy consistent with the scientific, political and institutional objectives of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO).

Fifty years of Library Bibliographic Classification Research and Development Center

The activities of the Library Bibliographic Classification (BBK) Research and Development Center are reviewed. The problem of BBK identifiers, history of the tables versions, managing Russian libraries’ transfer to BBK are the aspects widely discussed in professional media. The author reflects on BBK publication and use in foreign countries. For the first time, the author comments on the evaluation of the BBK by ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) experts. He also explains why to differentiate between the Soviet BBK and the BBK being Russia’s national classification system. The table of all Library Bibliographic Classification (BBK) editions with volume and circulation data for every volume (issue) is appended.

Epistemic communities in Knowledge Organization: An analysis of the NASKO meetings proceedings

Epistemic communities can be understood as networks of knowledge-based experts that hold in common a set of principled and causal beliefs, have shared notions of validity, exchange knowledge, and shape, demarcate, and articulate the identities of present and future knowledge producers. In Knowledge Organization, epistemic communities have been likened to the term “domain” in the domain-analytic paradigm. Acknowledging the important role that ISKO C-US, the International Society for Knowledge Organization: Chapter for Canada and United States, plays in the international production of scientific knowledge, we aim to characterize this epistemic community based on the publications of the five North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO) meetings proceedings. The results allow us to conclude that the ISKO C-US community is a productive, dialogical, and a continuously well-developed community with a well-balanced trajectory between an epistemological dimension, in search of its theoretical and methodological bases, and a social dimension, considering different cultural backgrounds. These aspects demarcate and shape the road for future research on knowledge organization.

New Russian State Standard devoted Universal Decimal Classification

Due to certification of GOST P 7.0.90-2016 regulating structure, rules of maintaining and indexing on the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) information of system in general, of the UDC Consortium, the place which occupies UDC in the world is given. It is told also about M. Dewey Decimal classification (DDC) and activities of International society for knowledge organization (ISKO). The structure of the standard is in detail considered, a number of correctly notes on the applied terminology indicated. Recently published guide books which can be used for profound studying of classification systems and technology of indexing are listed. At the end of article the author says about why all librarians should know UDC. Influence of this system on further development of the theory and practice of classification is huge. Article in general is aimed at the development of classification culture.

Relation between the domains of Information Retrieval and Knowledge Organization in international journals

The objective of this research is to analyze the thematic of international scientific production published during the 2006 – 2015 period on Knowledge Organization and Information Retrieval indexed in Web of Science an Scopus databases. This study develops a qualitative and exploratory research of a corpus of 100 papers that establishes a relationship between Knowledge Organization and Information Retrieval. The study also analyses the papers that are part of the corpus and classifies them into three categories, using the dimensions of Knowledge Organization that are considered themes in the Brazilian Congress on Knowledge Organization and Representation organized by the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO): epistemological dimension, applied dimension, social and political dimension. We found that most of the scientific production is concentrated in the applied dimension, which can be explained by the applied characteristic of Information Retrieval. The epistemological dimension is the second recurrent, and the social and political dimension has low incidence, which can be explained once the corpus is formed by the international scientific production and is not reflected in a dimension designed for a Brazilian Congress.

A new monograph on knowledge organization by Ingetraut Dahlberg

The work by Ingetraut Dahlberg, PhD, an outstanding German scientist, founder of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) is discussed. The content of her new book and other publications is reviewed. Dahlberg’s contribution to international cooperation in library and information studies is emphasized.

International Society For Knowledge Organization General Assembly September 2016 PROVISIONAL AGENDA

International Society For Knowledge Organization General Assembly September 2016 PROVISIONAL AGENDA

Knowledge organization and ISKO: state, demands, ideals

On the 13th conference of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) 2014 in Krakow a panel was held on ‘The Future of Knowledge Organization and ISKO’. Here a synopsis with additional information and more dense presentation is given by a panelist. The main items were: What is knowledge organization (KO)? What will be the most challenging for ISKO and KO in the future? What is your ideal picture of ISKO and KO of the future? The results were inter alia that KO is a general discipline and applicable in many areas, though it is mostly perceived as part of information and library science. To ameliorate its standing not only the fundamentals have to be worked out but also its diverse application fields and openness to new objects and methods. To integrate cultural and semantic diversity has to be seen as some important points in a polytely situation.

Nodes and arcs: concept map, semiotics, and knowledge organization

PurposeThe purpose of the research reported here is to improve comprehension of the socially‐negotiated identity of concepts in the domain of knowledge organization. Because knowledge organization as a domain has as its focus the order of concepts, both from a theoretical perspective and from an applied perspective, it is important to understand how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides an empirical demonstration of how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept. The paper employs content analysis to demonstrate the ways in which concepts are portrayed in KO concept maps as signs, and they are subjected to evaluative semiotic analysis as a way to understand their meaning. The frame was the entire population of formal proceedings in knowledge organization – all proceedings of the International Society for Knowledge Organization's international conferences (1990‐2010) and those of the annual classification workshops of the Special Interest Group for Classification Research of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (SIG/CR).FindingsA total of 344 concept maps were analyzed. There was no discernible chronological pattern. Most concept maps were created by authors who were professors from the USA, Germany, France, or Canada. Roughly half were judged to contain semiotic content. Peirceian semiotics predominated, and tended to convey greater granularity and complexity in conceptual terminology. Nodes could be identified as anchors of conceptual clusters in the domain; the arcs were identifiable as verbal relationship indicators. Saussurian concept maps were more applied than theoretical; Peirceian concept maps had more theoretical content.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates important empirical evidence about the coherence of the domain of knowledge organization. Core values are conveyed across time through the concept maps in this population of conference papers.

Building bridges: Linking diverse classification schemes as part of a technology change project

Unifying diverse content silos requires not simply bringing together assets, but also the metadata used to manage those assets. Often, as part of technology change projects, different Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), such as taxonomies and ontologies, need to be related. This may involve brokering agreements between different organizational or departmental cultures. Much work on developing metadata crosswalks has been at the heading or label level, but semantic analysis also needs to be undertaken when mapping diverse KOSs and, in practice, often needs to balance preservation of local or specialized terminology with accessibility for general users. This article, based on a presentation given at the second biennial conference of the UK chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK), describes a BBC project to bring together Archive and Production workspaces in which various metadata and KOS integration issues were encountered.

Metadata About What? Distinguishing Between Ontic, Epistemic, and Documental Dimensions in Knowledge Organization

Claudio Gnoli has been working as an academic librarian since 1994. His main interest is classification theory. He has published papers on this subject in several international journals and conference pro- ceedings. He is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Universal Decimal Classification Con- sortium (UDCC) and of the journal Knowledge Organization, and vice-president of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO). Gnoli, Claudio. Metadata About What? Distinguishing Between Ontic, Epistemic, and Documental Dimensions in Knowledge Organization. Knowledge Organization. 39(4), 268-275. 37 references. ABSTRACT: The spread of many new media and formats is changing the scenario faced by knowledge organizers: as printed monographs are not the only standard form of knowledge carrier anymore, the traditional kind of knowl- edge organization (KO) systems based on academic disciplines is put into question. A sounder foundation can be provided by an analysis of the different dimensions concurring to form the content of any knowledge item—what Brian Vickery described as the steps from the world to the classifier. The ultimate referents of documents are the phenomena of the real world, that can be ordered by ontology, the study of what exists. Phenomena coexist in subjects with the perspectives by which they are considered, pertaining to epistemology, and with the formal features of knowledge carriers, adding a further, pragmatic layer. All these di- mensions can be accounted for in metadata, but are often done so in mixed ways, making indexes less rigorous and interoperable. For example, while facet analysis was originally developed for subject indexing, many faceted interfaces today mix subject fac- ets with form facets, and schemes presented as ontologies for the semantic Web also code for non-semantic information. In bibliographic classifications, phenomena are often confused with the disciplines dealing with them, the latter being assumed to be the most useful starting point, for users will have either one or another perspective. A general citation order of dimensions— phenomena, perspective, carrier—is recommended, helping to concentrate most relevant information at the beginning of head- ings.

The fall and rise of knowledge organization: new dimensions of subject description and retrieval

PurposeThe purpose of this editorial is to introduce the selected Proceedings of the 1st National Conference of ISKO UK, the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization. It aims to provide some background for the group, and place it within the context of the recent history of information organization and retrieval in subject domains.Design/methodology/approachThe paper introduces a selection of papers delivered at the 1st National Conference of the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization.FindingsThe field of knowledge organization is lively and progressive, and researchers and practitioners in many sectors are actively engaged with it, despite its apparent decline in LIS education. New communities of interest may use different terms to describe this work, but there is much common ground, and a growing convergence of ideas and methods.Originality/valueThe value of existing theory is now more widely recognised, and the importance of structured knowledge organization systems and vocabularies in retrieval is generally acknowledged. It is to be hoped that these important areas of information practice and research will soon be restored to their former place in professional education.

Nancy J. Williamson and the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO)

This article documents and analyzes Nancy J. Williamson's contributions to two of the major publications of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), International Classification/ Knowledge Organization and Advances in Classification Research. The results show her serious and long-standing commitment to the field of representing and organizing information and knowledge and her dedication to expanding worldwide interest and involvement in these fields. The Appendix provides access to each of Williamson's contributions to the two ISKO publications.

Classification Transcends Library Business

KO KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION , Seite 223 - 229