lazykoblog   occasional musings about knowledge organization

When I first began to teach a seminar in knowledge organization at LIU in the 1990s I began preparation for the course with the reading lists from a seminar in bibliographic control that I had team-taught with Arlene Taylor at Columbia University. I added quite a lot to it, of course, and proudly presented the hefty document to my new students. Every year after that I updated the bibliography, making it ever more terrifying with each update. When I first offered the seminar at UWM in 2010 I discovered the heft of the document was putting off students. (Although, in my defense, I always had offered it as a reference tool and it never was the entire required reading list.) I stopped maintaining the list after that. Not too much later, The Elements of Knowledge Organization (Springer 2014) was published, and I decided to retire the bibliography because it was, essentially, the reference list from that book.

This spring I taught the seminar in knowledge organization at UWM. At some point in the semester I told a version of this story, and at the end of the course a couple of the students asked to see the list. So, I updated it. I decided I ought to offer it here, as a reference list, for anybody who is trying to grasp the finer points of the basics of knowledge organization. You will see contents cover classical texts in descriptive cataloging and subject analysis as well as classification and more contemporaneous topics in knowledge organization, such as interdisciplinarity and domain analysis.

Cheers.

Smiraglia_Basic KO Bibliography 030618

Inspired by encountering quotations from Two Kinds of Power in conference papers last summer I undertook an analysis of the domain defined by those who cite Wilsons famous book. The paper is to be presented at the 2007 conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information: Among Patrick Wilson’s most influential books was Two Kinds of Power, which has influenced scholars in information science, and particularly in knowledge organization. Tools of domain analysis are used to analyze the corpus of literature that cites Two kinds of power. Aboutness and relevance are demonstrated keys to this specialization.

The Proceedings are here: http://www.cais-acsi.ca/2007proceedings.htm. I am really quite fascinated by the concept that author co-citation analysis gives us a picture of symbolic interaction. That is, that what we see is how the scholarly community perceives intellectual connections among the co-cited authors. As I mentioned only briefly in the paper, there seem to be clear social networks in the map that focus on the lineage of dissertation advising. For my presentation I added a final slide using this quotation from Two Kinds of Power (p. 132): “Let us imagine a Supreme Bibliographical Council, whose task it was to evaluate the bibliographical situations ….” I decided that’s what we’re looking at here. Marcia Bates is the “chief justice” and there are two parties, one in IR represented by Belkin and Saracevic, and another in KO dominated by Hjorland, with Howard White as the swing vote. Well, it’s a metaphor ….

Fascinating to see Åström’s paper in JASIST 58(7): 947-57, in which he finds informetrics and ISR stable but that user-oriented and experimental IR research have merged into one field–ISR. This is comparable I think, to my finding that “aboutness” was a historical node but has given way to IR and KO. Interesting ….