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Breaking Up Is Hard To Do - Revisited: Reflections on Brexit and the 25th Anniversary of Sloexit
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The classification of Harris: Influences of Bacon and Hegel in the universe of library classification
Full text linkThe studies of library classifications generally interact with a historical approach that contextualizes the research and with the ideas related to classification that are typical of Philosophy. In the 19th century, the North-American philosopher and educator William Torrey Harris developed a book classification at the St. Louis Public School, based on Francis Bacon and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The objective of the present study is to analyze Harris’s classification, reflecting upon his theoretical and philosophical backgrounds in order to understand Harris’s contribution to Knowledge Organization (KO). To achieve such objective, this study adopts a critical-descriptive approach for the analysis. The results show some influences of Bacon and Hegel in Harris’s classification
Epistemic communities in Knowledge Organization: An analysis of the NASKO meetings proceedings
Full text linkEpistemic 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
Comparative Approaches to Interdisciplinary KOSs: Use Cases of Converting UDC to BCC
Full text linkWe take a small sample of works and compare how these are classified within both the Universal Decimal Classification and the Basic concepts Classification. We examine notational length, expressivity, network effects, and the number of subject strings. One key finding is that BCC typically synthesizes many more terms than UDC in classifying a particular document – but the length of classificatory notations is roughly equivalent for the two KOSs. BCC captures documents with fewer subject strings (generally one) but these are more complex
THE LARGE VERTEBRATE REMAINS FROM BINJAI TAMIENG (SUMATRA, INDONESIA)
Full text linkExcavations in 1928 at the Binjai Tamieng shell midden in Northeast Sumatra brought to light a small assemblage of animal- and human remains that has never been studied in detail. The analysis of these Early Holocene finds suggests that besides mollusks and fish, a number of larger vertebrates played a role in the palaeoeconomy of the site. The composition of Binjai Tamieng has a somewhat similar signature to sites from Southern Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia. Testudine and artiodactyl remains are predominant in the vertebrate assemblage, while other species such as crocodile and a small cetacean were probably opportunistically hunted or scavenged. Animal bone was probably also used for the manufacturing of tools. Javan- and possibly Sumatran rhinoceros are present on the site. A number of human remains show traces of disarticulation and may be indicative of complex funerary rituals or cannibalism
Knowledge Organization and the Power to Name: Gay Men, Terminology, and the Polyhedron of Empowerment
Full text linkThis paper uses Hope Olson’s concept of “the power to name” to explore the terminological practices of the LGBTQ community in the Cariri region of Brazil in the years between 2006 and 2013. LGBTQ communities can seize back the “power to name,” traditionally exerted by a heteronormative society upon marginalized groups, by organizing their cultural and practical knowledge from within, and by exercising the power to name themselves and their specific domains and cultural practices. The study showed that knowledge organization—the act of defining entities and categories and assigning specific names to them—is a gesture of self-empowerment on many different levels. The “power of self-naming” in this LGBTQ community is a polyhedron in which some facets are frequent, such as the power to empower or affirm an identity. On the one hand, the names and categories break through gender, geographical and temporal specificity to embrace terms, names, and idioms drawn from a range of different countries, traditions, languages, and time periods. On the other hand, these names and categories work to reinforce and affirm the geographical and cultural specificity of the Cariri region itself, embedding its pride and self-affirmation within the varied languages and heteronormative history of Portuguese colonization in that region. In selecting terms and categories to name, organize and celebrate their identities, the LGBTQ people of Cariri have taken the power to name: not as information intermediaries striving for objectivity and neutrality, but as committed members of a marginalized but vital community
The search value added by subject descriptors in journal databases
Full text linkGross et al. (2015) have demonstrated that about a quarter of hits would typically be lost to keyword searchers if contemporary academic library catalogs dropped their controlled subject headings. This paper reports on an analysis of the loss levels that would result if a bibliographic database, namely the Australian Education Index (AEI), were missing the subject descriptors and identifiers assigned by its professional indexers, employing the methodology developed by Gross and Taylor (2005), and later by Gross et al. (2015). The results indicate that AEI users would lose a similar proportion of hits per query to that experienced by library catalog users: on average, 27% of the resources found by a sample of keyword queries on the AEI database would not have been found without the subject indexing, based on the Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors (ATED). The paper also discusses the methodological limitations of these studies, pointing out that real-life users might still find some of the resources missed by a particular query through follow-up searches, while additional resources might also be found through iterative searching on the subject vocabulary. The paper goes on to describe a new research design, based on a before-and-after experiment, which addresses some of these limitations. It is argued that this alternative design will provide a more realistic picture of the value that professionally assigned subject indexing and controlled subject vocabularies can add to literature searching of a more scholarly and thorough kind