Knowledge Organization at the Interface
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Negin Shokrzadeh Hashtroudi – Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran Mohsen Haji Zeinolabedini – Department of Information Science and Knowledge, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran Educational Practices of Knowledge Organization in Iran A Historical Review Abstract: In this paper, we discussed the educational practices of the Knowledge Organization in Iran. This paper is a historical review. In order to analyze the educational practices of Knowledge Organization related researches are reviewed. Also, curriculums of The Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT) are analyzed to identify courses related to Knowledge Organization and their units. In past years, some courses have been modified or revised to meet user needs. 1.0 Introduction Knowledge organization is one of the most important courses in LIS education. Core elements of this field have a significant impact on developing curriculums of LIS (Pat- tuelli 2010; Alajmi and Rehman 2016). Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the last curriculums of educational levels to identify the compatibility degree between modern Knowledge organization approaches with current Iranian curriculums. In 1965, the first library department in Iran established at the University of Tehran. Also, standard prac- tices of cataloging and classification were started in 1968 by the establishment of TEBROC (Tehran Book Processing Centre) (Fattahi 2007). Later, in 1983 TEBROC was incorporated into the National Library of Iran. These two agencies had an important role in the standardization of cataloging in Iran. This study aims to investigate new trends and developments of KO education in Iran. In this study we addressed 3 main questions. These questions are: • What developments are considered in Iran related to education in KO? • How Iranian LIS curriculums are changed based on new developments in KO? This study is a historical review. To gather the required data curriculums of The Ira- nian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT) and The Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MHME) and related researches were analyzed. 2.0 Results Anglo-American cataloging Rules second edition (AACR2) and MARC format are still the most crucial technologies in Iran. In 1992 Rahmatollah Fattahi translated AACR2 into the Persian language (Fattahi 1992). On the other hand, the National Li- brary and Archives of Iran (NLAI) developed the IRANMARC format based on UNIMARC. Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and Dewey Decimal Classifica- tion (DDC) are widely used in Iranian Libraries and they are included in the curriculum of Information Science and Knowledge. Also, in medical universities NLM classifica- tion and Medical Subject Heading (MESH) are taught to students. Likewise, in many universities of Iran, laboratories of Knowledge Organization are enriched to meet stu- dents’ needs. For instance, Shahid Beheshti University has launched liblab. Iranian Au- thority files, thesauruses, classification schedules are prepared in these laboratories. © Ergon - ein Verlag in der Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 552 Table 1. Knowledge Organization courses in Iran Degrees Courses related to KO Theory Practice Undergraduate Descriptive and analytical cataloging 1 1 Dewey Decimal Classification 1 1 Library of Congress Classification 1 1 Designing library software 1 1 Computerized organization of 1 1 references Indexing and abstracting 1 1 Designing digital library 1 1 Master Information Representation 1 1 (Information Management) Information Storage and Retrieval 1 1 Master (digital library Digital resources organization 1 1 management) Digital libraries user interface 1 1 Doctoral Natural language processing 1 1 (Information and Knowledge Semantic web and ontology 1 1 Retrieval) Information architecture 1 1 Text analysis and knowledge mining 1 1 Doctoral (Information and Knowledge audit and Organization 1 1 Knowledge management) More than 100 books have been written in this field to cover various aspects of Knowledge organization (Malek Mohammadi and Haji Zeinolabedini 2017). Fattahi and Pazooki (2018) showed that 25 M.A. theses and 7 Ph.D. theses have been written in the new approaches of Knowledge Organization. As stated in Malek Mohammadi and Haji Zeinolabedini (2018) the most frequent keywords in Knowledge Organization theses were cataloging, information retrieval, library software, IRANMARC and indexing. On the other hand, one of the most significant events in Iran is the annual congress of Iranian Information experts. This event is holding every year in Iran since 2015. Also, a winter school for Knowledge Organization will be held at Shahid Beheshti University this year. The main topics of this winter school are conceptual models (such as LRM and CIDOC CRM), content and metadata standards (such as RDA and BIBFRAME), and Knowledge Organization tools (such as ontologies and semantic systems). 3.0 Conclusion Knowledge Organization has a changing nature and has undergone an evolution in cat- aloging in the last years. As stated in Fattahi (2007) “publishing of many textbooks, manuals, and articles is strong evidence for the significance of Information Organization in teaching and practice in Iran”. We need skilled students who are ready to work in Knowledge organization departments of different agencies and also we need a more emphasize on new developments such as semantic web. Therefore, Iranian libraries have to replace their traditional catalogs with new approaches. Likewise, there are some de- velopments in the library software of Iran. For instance, a joint working group between the Central library of Shahid Beheshti University and the Central library of Allameh Tabatabaei University has been made to apply RDA in their library systems. Likewise, in Qoqnus software, CIDOC CRM has been implemented. In this software all necessary classes and properties are utilized to represent cultural objects. This project represented © Ergon - ein Verlag in der Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 553 as the outcome of Niknia (2019) in modelling archaeological literature and it is available at https://qoqnus.nosa.com/nhims/search. References Alajmi, Bibi and Sajjad Rehman. 2016. “Knowledge Organization Trends In Library And Infor- mation Education: Assessment And Analysis.” Education for Information 32, no. 4: 411-420. Fattahi, Rahmatollah. 2007. “Information Organization in Iranian Libraries and Information Cen- ters: Trends.” International Journal of Information Science and Management (IJISM) 5, no. 1: 29-40. (in Persian) Fattahi, Rahmatollah. 1992. Translation of AACR2. Mashhad: Astane-Quds. Fattahi, Rahmatollah and Fatemeh Pazooki. 2018. “Recent Research and Developments in Infor- mation Organization in Iran: A Historical Review.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 56, no. 4: 374-384. Niknia, M. 2019. Implementation of CIDOC CRM for the Domain of Iranian Archaeology. Ph.D. dissertation. Tehran, Iran: Kharazmi University. (in Persian) Malek Mohammadi, Saeed and Mohsen Haji Zeinolabedini. 2017. “A Decade of Book Publishing in Knowledge and Information Science in Iran (2002-2011).” Journal of Modern Medical Information Science 3, no. 1: 16-21. (in Persian) Malek Mohammadi, Saeed and Mohsen Haji Zeinolabedini. 2018. “Analyzing the Status of In- formation and Knowledge Organization Theses in Iran (2008-2017).” Presented at 12th Con- gress of Progress Pioneers. 13 December 2018. (in Persian). Pattuelli, M. Cristina.. 2010. “Knowledge Organization Landscape: A Content Analysis of Intro- ductory Courses.” Journal of Information Science 36, no. 6: 812-822 © Ergon - ein Verlag in der Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.