Danish/Nordic Interpretation of Knowledge Organization and LIS

1. Introducing lecture on: the Danish/Nordic interpretation of the field of Knowledge Organization (KO) and LISBirger HjørlandTuesday the 6th of February 200713.00-14.40

2. Introduction • I have been asked to make this presentation by Karen Myhre, and I am glad to have been given this opportunity. • However, an interpretation of what is special about the Danish/Nordic approach to Knowledge Organization (KO) and Library and Information Science (LIS) is, of course, always a personal interpretation. Whether my colleagues and other people agree, is up to them to answer.

3. Introduction • Also: It is not ordinary to ask about (or to write about) national traditions in Knowledge Organization. • Harvey, R. (1999). Organising knowledge in Australia is an exception from the rule that KO mostly ignore national differences. Generally is KO considered an international field and different approaches may be represented in the same countries. • Nevertheless, I shall try to provide an answer.

4. Introduction • Perhaps the following issues come first at mind: • 1)Theory and practice. We have, like other schools and departments of LIS, staff involved in rules, standards and guidelines for cataloging, classification, indexing etc. We are in a transition from a vocational institution to an academic and research based institution, and we try to cover both practical needs and academic ways of doing LIS and KO. We have people with kinds of both practical and theoretical knowledge.

5. Introduction • The Scandinavian schools of LIS, in contrast to the American departments, have special departments for the study of media and culture. This add some humanist perspective, for example, we have PhD.-students focusing on Knowledge Organization in fiction and in architectural drawings in cooperation between department of information studies and cultural studies.

6. Introduction • 3) Recently, our school has gone strongly into bibliometrics. Some of our PhD students have made their thesis on bibliometric approaches to knowledge organization. I believe we are internationally leading in this field, and this will of course also be reflected in this course. • 4) Because we are large school, we have many kinds of specialists, already mentioned cultural people and bibliometricans. We have also people working with front technologies like ‘the semantic web’. So, pluralism is certainly among the characteristics of Danish/Nordic KO and LIS.

7. Introduction • 5) Internationally, LIS moved from “documentation” and the study of documents towards “information science” and the study of “information”. Some have argued for the importance of the study of documents, bibliography and genres, and Scandinavia is perhaps the part of the world where this emphasis of documents has the strongest foothold. • 6) Last but not least, we have a lot of theoretical approaches and we care about KO and its historical development which involve considering what is going on in the field internationally.

8. KO: Broad and narrow • I believe all four teachers in this course share the view that it is important to consider KO in both a narrow and broad perspective. • The narrow perspective are the knowledge organizing processes done by LIS-professionals as well as the knowledge organizing systems (KOS) used for this purpose. In a way this is all what KO is about, but the proper understanding of this is closely connected to knowledge about broader issues, related to social organization and the production of knowledge and meaning.

9. KO: Broad and narrow • The Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, famous for his book “mind in society”, wrote, that in order to understand the human mind you have to regard it from a social perspective. I believe this is important, and also applies to KO: You cannot study mind by contemplating or studying other people, without understanding the context for their actions. You cannot understand why a person acts in a given way unless you know the social system of which that person forms a part. In the same way you cannot understand KO unless you understand how both texts and users are formed by discourses, disciplines, theories, ideologies, and other kinds of contexts.

10. KO: Broad and narrow • When studying information needs, for example, you ask: Why does that person use this information? You may search the answer in the persons sex, age, personality etc. A very realist answer is, however, because he need the information for his job. What information that is needed by you as students, by us as teachers, by all people, is to a very large degree determined by their roles in organizations, disciplines, companies etc, i.e. by the social division of labor.

11. KO: Broad and narrow • The social division of labor is one among two basic things, that determine how knowledge is organized: • It is organized socially in, for example, disciplines and specialties • It is organized cognitively, by ontological theory, like the biological species and the chemical elements, i.e. How things in the world are organized. • In LIS, we have to regard both kinds of knowledge organization, they are both reflected in our knowledge organizing systems (KOS).

12. KO: Broad and narrow • Jack Andersen has formulated what LIS in his opinion is. I find this formulation very good, and it emphasizes the social perspective in Knowledge Organization: • "Library and information science (LIS) is the study of knowledge production as it is materialized in documents, and of through which channels this knowledge is communicated and how one can make access to this knowledge in terms of organization and representation of documents. In this way, the study of knowledge organization plays a crucial role in LIS. • . . .

13. KO: Broad and narrow • The study of knowledge organization has a long tradition in LIS. However, this tradition has been characterized by searching for techniques for knowledge organization rather than having arrived at an profound understanding of the nature and function of knowledge organization in society. Therefore, it is important to connect the study of knowledge organization and its problems with analyses of society’s production of knowledge. • . . .

14. KO: Broad and narrow • In order to arrive at an understanding the production of knowledge in society, philosophical, historical, sociology of science and knowledge, cultural, literary, and social aspects of knowledge production need to be recognized. Knowledge should not be conceived of as scientific knowledge only, but also as artistic, technical, and ‘everyday life’ knowledge; that is a basic pragmatic view on knowledge. A practical consequence of this conception must be to contribute to an understanding of why it is important to ”keep the valuable from oblivion” (Patrick Wilson, 1968, p. 1). " (Andersen, 2001).

15. Metaperspectives on LIS • Jack’s theoretical perspective on LIS is a metaperspective that competes with other metaperspectives in LIS (to be introduced in particular by Jeppe Nicolaisen). • Such a perspective seems important for how you look at LIS, what questions this field should contribute answers to.

16. Metaperspectives on LIS • The modern, Western discourses of LIS have mostly introduced perspectives focusing on users (“user oriented” and “cognitive approaches”), on technology (“systems oriented approaches”), on the library as institution (“the institutional approach”) or on management perspectives (e.g., “information management”), while a bibliographical perspective focusing on documents and information resources, their description, organization, mediation and use is almost absent, although this is what the field is all about.

17. Metaperspectives on LIS • The bibliographical paradigm is not, for example, mentioned among 13 metatheoretical perspectives introduced by Bates (2005), which is probably the most comprehensive overview of approaches to LIS available today.

18. UDC • UDC (the Universal Decimal Classification) may be considered a sacred document within Library and Information Science (LIS) and Knowledge Organization, and as belonging to “the bibliographical paradigm”. Recently a new English edition has been published (British Standards Institution, 2005).

19. UDC • UDC has played an important role as a classification system in research libraries in many countries around the world. It is still very much used around the world. Some nations use the system in their national bibliographies. Why are systems like the UDC not forming part of a strong bibliographical paradigm within LIS? • A first kind of crisis in relation to the UDC perhaps occurred with the so-called Cranfield studies of the late 1950’s, which found that UDC (along with other similar systems based on “human indexing”) did not contribute to improve information retrieval in electronic databases.

20. UDC • This conclusion from the Cranfield studies may be wrong (or at least be only a statistical generalization that neglects some kind of questions for which systems like UDC might be superior). It is said that the people responsible for UDC-classification in the Cranfield experiments felt that the experimental questions disqualified tasks for which the UDC might be superior. However, they never performed alternative experiments, and since then have classification researchers been rather invisible in, for example, bibliometric maps of LIS.

21. UDC • In spite of this first crisis, the practical use of the system has so far not declined (and it has also implied some research and development activities on a small scale). • Another crisis for the UDC seems to have appeared in the 1980s and is related to the maintenance and further development of the system.This crisis may be connected to a more general uncertainty in the library communities concerning the future role of knowledge organizing systems (KOS) such as the UDC.

22. UDC • The middle of the 1980s was the heydays of artificial intelligence. Concepts such as “intelligent agents” for individualized information retrieval were often thought to make traditional KOS superfluous. However, such theoretical issues have never received the deep scientific examination that they deserve. Researchers and practitioners have chosen some kind of systems based on some kinds of assumptions, without real comparison and investigation of those assumptions.

23. UDC • Investment in the maintenance and development of KOS may have suffered without proper basis in research: The mere suspicion that this kind of systems could be obsolete was strongly demotivating for further investment of time, energy and intellectual efforts in constructing them.

24. UDC • Also research itself may have suffered because many students and researchers within LIS did not engage themselves in specific contributions to the improvement of such KOS. Instead they engaged themselves in other kinds of studies, some of which may be productive in the development of alternative kinds of KOS, while other kinds of studies simply seems to have lost their relation and relevance to LIS.

25. UDC • Let us consider some important concepts from LIS: • Digital library • Knowledge organization • Indexing • Automatic indexing • Information management • Information retrieval • None of these concepts are included in the index in the 2005 edition!

26. UDC • In philosophy: • A priory knowledge • Tacit knowledge • In psychology • Hope • Illusions • In social welfare • Citizens’ advice bureaux • Low income • None of those concepts are represented in the 2005 UDC.

27. UDC • Aitchison (1986) described how the Bliss classification can be used to make a thesaurus. The same way one could imagine that the work made by some classification researchers would be reused in new systems. The examples above indicate, however, that this has not been the case in UDC.

28. UDC • Mills (2004, p. 547): • "The development of logically structured classifications covering the whole of knowledge is still unique in the field of LIS. These provide detailed maps of knowledge to assist in the searching of stores of records and can be used as the basis of, or valuable supplements to, numerous other retrieval languages". • Such a dream of a cumulative project was UDC once (and perhaps still is for some people). It may have been based on some naïve premises (to be presented below), but still having an important kernel worth working for.

29. UDC • It is somewhat ironic than the most used tool for KO in libraries today is the DDC first published 1876. More that hundred years of research and the development of other kinds of KOS has not resulted in making DDC obsolete. For example, the BC2 is generally considered theoretically more advanced, but have difficulties being used in practice. • Systems like UDC, DDC and Bliss may all be criticized for their “universalist” assumption, which may, for example, be described this way (by some Nordic researchers):

30. Theory of knowledge organization • “While unitary documentary languages ensure a maximum of mutual understanding [. . .], they do so by legitimizing a particular ideological and sociopolitical worldview, and by silencing other meanings, voices, and ways of knowing [. . .]. Unitary documentary languages embody a belief in the existence of a unified body of knowledge. They express a belief in the possibility to capture reality isomorphically in “information,” and presuppose a neutral ground from which to judge the truth-value of different theories.” (Tuominen; Talja & Savolainen, 2003).

31. Theory of knowledge organization • Although a similar problem exist at the disciplinary level (that different conceptions of the discipline co-exists and that KOS reflects one particular view at the expense of other views), is the problem significantly reduced in disciplinary systems compared with universal systems.

32. Theory of knowledge organization • Traditionally has LIS-education been very much about standards, norms, rules and guidelines for KO – connected to underlying norms of objectivity and neutrality in representing knowledge. (perhaps aiming at “complete descriptions”) Simplified: Positivist norms have dominated the field. • The alternatives may have many names, e.g. relativism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, postmodernism, critical theory, standpoint theory. We believe the understanding of the implications of such views of knowledge is very important.

33. Theory of knowledge organization • It is a big job to read about many such approaches. A few will shortly be presented in the course. Jeppe Nicolaisen and I have made an “Epistemological lifeboat”, which may help to get a quick overview of different positions and their implications. • The alternative to “positivist norms” are descriptions that functional (for somebody in some respect) , that are based on some kind of values and which supports some kinds of activities.

34. Theory of knowledge organization • Last, but not least: We emphasize that this is an academic course, helping you to examine problems in KO and write well-argued papers about those problems. The course and the teachers individual advice will provide a basis for writing about topics as, for example, those listed at this place: • http://www.db.dk/bh/Lifeboat_KO/HISTORY%20&%20THEORY/ideas_for_writing_term_papers.htm • (end)

35. References • Aitchison, J. (1986). A Classification as a Source for a Thesaurus: The Bibliographic Classification of H. E. Bliss as a Source of Thesaurus Terms and Structure. Journal of Documentation, 42(3), 160-181. • Andersen, J. (2001). Homepage. http://web.archive.org/web/20010622211437/http://www.db.dk/jan/home_uk.htm

36. References • Bates, M. J. (2005). An introduction to metatheories, theories, and models. IN: Fisher, K. E., Erdelez, S. & McKechnie, L. (eds.). Theories of information behavior. Medford, NJ: Information Today. (Pp. 1-24).

37. References • British Standards Institution (2005). Universal Decimal Classification. Standard Edition. Vol. 1-2. London: British Standards Institution. • Broughton, V.; Hansson, J.; Hjørland, B. & López-Huertas, M. J. (2005). [Chapter 7:] Knowledge Organization. IN: European Curriculum Reflections onLibrary and Information Science Education. Ed. by L. Kajberg & L. Lørring. Copenhagen: Royal School of Library and Information Science. (Pp. 133-148). http://www.db.dk/bh/lifeboat_ko/KnowledgeOrg_chapter%207.pdf

38. References • Harvey, R. (1999). Oganising knowledge in Australia : principles and practice in libraries and information centres. Wagga Wagga, N.S.W. : Centre for Information Studies

39. References • Wilson, P. (1968). Two Kinds of Power. An Essay on Bibliographical Control. Berkley: University of California Press.