Knowledge Organization

Knowl. Org. 43(2016)No.6 475 Reviews of Concepts in Knowledge Organization * † Knowledge Organization (KO) Birger Hjørland Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, 6 Birketinget, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark, <[email protected]> Birger Hjørland holds an MA in psychology and PhD in library and information science. He is Professor in knowledge organization at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen since 2001 and at the University College in Borås 2000-2001. He was research librarian at the Royal Library in Copenha- gen 1978-1990, and taught information science at the Department of Mathematical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen 1983-1986. He is chair of ISKO’s Scientific Advisory Council and a member of the editorial boards of Knowledge Organization, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and Journal of Documentation. His H-index is 38 in Google Scholar and 21 in Web of Science. Hjørland, Birger. 2016. “Knowledge Organization (KO).” Knowledge Organization 43: 475-484. 61 references. * Derived from the article of the same title in the ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization, version 1.0; published 2016-08-01; article category: disciplines † Thanks to Maria Teresa Biagetti for serving as the editor for this article and to two anonymous referees for providing valuable feed- back. 1.0 Introduction indication of selected semantic relations, for example, classification systems, lists of subject headings, thesauri, on- KO is a field of research, teaching and practice, which is tologies and other systems of metadata. mostly affiliated with library and information science (LIS). People like Charles A. Cutter, W. C. Berwick Sayers and KO is first and foremost institutionalized in professorships Ernest Cushington Richardson established the field at universities around the world, in teaching and research “knowledge organization” as an academic field around programs at research institutions and schools of higher 1900. Henry Bliss’ 1929 book The Organization of Knowledge education, in scholarly journals (for example, Knowledge Or- and the System of the Sciences also represents one of the main ganization, 1993- ), in national and international confer- intellectual contributions establishing the field. These au- ences, in national and international organizations (for ex- thors argued that book classification should be based on ample, the International Society for Knowledge Organiza- knowledge organization as it appears in science and schol- tion, ISKO, cf., Dahlberg 2010). arship. KO is about describing, representing, filing and organiz- ing documents, document representations, subjects and 2.0 Research traditions, approaches and concepts both by humans and by computer programs (cf., basic theoretical issues in KO Hjørland 2008). For these purposes rules and standards are developed, including classification systems, lists of subject Traditionally, approaches to KO are divided into human- headings, thesauri and other forms of metadata. The or- based approaches versus machine-based approaches (cf. ganization of knowledge in classification systems and con- Anderson and Pérez-Carballo 2001a, b). There are, how- cept systems are core subjects in KO. The two main as- ever, many different kinds of human approaches and many pects of KO are (1) knowledge organization processes different kinds of computer-based approaches, and they (KOP) and (2) knowledge organization systems (KOS). are not necessarily distinct. For example, human-based ap- Knowledge organization processes (KOP) are, for exam- proaches may be very mechanical, if humans just follow ple, the processes of cataloging, subject analysis, indexing simple rules they have learned such as alphabetical ar- and classification by humans or computers. Knowledge or- rangement, or finding best matches for book titles in a ganization systems (KOS) are selection of concepts with given KOS. Both humans and machines may or may not 476 Knowl. Org. 43(2016)No.6 Reviews of Concepts in Knowledge Organization base their classification on citations, and if they both do, Dewey, whom he certainly surpassed in intellectual ability, they are applying a similar approach. Hjørland (2011b) but by whom he was dwarfed in organizational ability and therefore argued that this traditional distinction is theoreti- drive” (Garfield 1974, 291). Bliss’ view of consensus cally unfruitful. Alternatively, it was suggested that human probably reflected the positivism or modernism of his indexers as well as programmers are guided by their time. He wrote ([1933]1939, 37): knowledge and theories, which—at the deepest—is con- nected to their (often-implicit) theories of knowledge. The more definite the concepts, the relations, and However, it is often difficult to reveal what kind of theo- the principles of science, philosophy, and education retical assumption guide KOPs. Such processes are often become, the clearer and more stable the order of done intuitively and some systems have been difficult to re- the sciences and studies in relation to learning and late to a theory. However, the following eight+ traditions in to life; and so the scientific and educational consen- and outside KO are probably the most influential and im- sus becomes more dominant and more permanent. portant today. Kruk (1999) is among the critiques of this view and wrote 2.0A. Approaches developed inside KO “In the twentieth century knowledge is not perceived as a solid structure any more. The universal library is a utopian 2.1 Practicalist and intuitivist approaches vision and it belongs to the same category as the universal encyclopedia and the universal language.” Today Bliss’ view These are approaches, which give priority to practical mat- is contrasted by a view of knowledge much more con- ters such as using the same classification system for several cerned with conflicting interests and perspectives (cf. the libraries and thereby facilitating centralization of classifica- domain analytic view, 2.5). His engagement with the litera- tion and indexing. From this perspective, KO should be ture to be classified is, however, still an important principle. balanced between, on the one hand, adequate and updated Bliss’ reception may reveal something about hostility subject knowledge, and on the other hand, the need for that serious academic work may encounter in librarian- stability in order to avoid reclassification. The model here ship dominated by practicalism (Campbell 1976, 139): is the Dewey Decimal Classification system (DDC, first edition constructed by Melvil Dewey in 1876), which today is the Bliss had announced his intention to develop a new dominant library system worldwide. (The practicalism de- general classification in the Library Quarterly in scribed in this section should not be confused with prag- 1910. The announcement met with bitter hostility, matism, which has a deep intellectual foundation and not from Melvil Dewey (Bliss always said that his commitment and which is important in the domain- personal relations with Dewey were cordial …) but analytic approach described in 2.5 below). from some of Dewey’s disciples. Bliss gradually be- Another example is the journal classification in the ci- came a rather solitary figure in the American library tation databases: “The Institute of Scientific Information scene, and his later work met with apathy. (ISI) itself provides a classification of journals at the level of the database that has been based on intuitive criteria Further (Campbell 1976, 139): (Pudovkin & Garfield 2002).” (Leydesdorff 2006, 602). In other words, no kind of research based criteria were Bliss’s first book, The Organization of Knowledge and used, just the intuition of the classifiers. the System of the Sciences, was published in 1929 by Henry Bolt & Co., New York, after he had failed to 2.2 Consensus based approaches interest the American Library Association in it. Only three of Bliss’s papers were ever published by Henry E. Bliss (1929; [1933]1939) found that library classi- the Association, and two of those were condensed fication should be based on what he referred to as the sci- …. The American Library Association, after nego- entific and educational consensus. “Topics should be collo- tiations lasting several years, refused to publish his cated and placed in classes not according to the whim of second book without a generous subsidy from the the person who devises the classification system, but ac- author sufficient to cover all publishing costs. cording to the standards set by scientists and educators” (Drobnicki 1996, 3). It was characteristic a) that Bliss con- Fortunately, this hostility did not hinder Bliss’ recogni- sulted the scholarly literature and b) believed that one is tion: “The two books … and the outline version of his able to detect an underlying pattern of agreement. Eugene scheme, A System of Bibliographic Classification (1935, 2nd Garfield has described Henry Bliss as “a true scholar. His ed., 1936) won him a reputation in many parts of the goals and aspirations were different from those of Melvil world as an original thinker of great power, and a classifi- Knowl. Org. 43(2016)No.6 477 Reviews of Concepts in Knowledge Organization cationist who was not afraid to tread out new paths” Different communities may be interested in the same (Campbell 1976, 139). object (e.g. a stone in the field [or a given book]) but may interpret it differently (e.g. from an archeological 2.3 Facet-analytic

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