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An important aspect of ASIS&T's international outreach is service to indigenous populations, a need that has received greater recognition since Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's public apology in 2008 for past disruption of Native families. The emerging field of indigenous librarianship can contribute significantly to the process of reconciliation in Canada and other countries with similar colonial legacies. Indigenous librarianship requires reconsidering the organization, classification and representation of library materials from a perspective free of culture- and language-based assumptions. Key themes in indigenous librarianship include removing barriers to access, providing culturally relevant materials and services and departing from widely used knowledge organization systems such as the Dewey Decimal System to create classifications that reflect the Native worldview and epistemology. Successful examples include Australia's Pathways thesaurus project, the Maori Subject Headings from Aotearoa/New Zealand and the British Columbia First Nations Names Authority. Increased involvement by Indigenous people in information studies will enhance accurate representation of their cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Knowledge organization systems (KOS) are ubiquitous and helpful, but from an economist's perspective their value and contribution to economic productivity are hard to quantify. Though estimating the aggregate impact of KOS is a challenge, it is possible to enhance that impact through the use of a shared or interoperable controlled vocabulary with rules for interpreting text. Like RDF triplets underlying the Semantic Web, elements can be identified to represent phenomena, relationships and properties, and then combined using a synthetic approach to generate complex concepts. Such a vocabulary would be enhanced with related concept information, expanding a user's discovery through a web of hierarchical and associative relationships. The vocabulary would be interdisciplinary and applicable to any database, geared to building upon simple expressions for generic phenomena. The KOS could serve as a universal thesaurus complementing the combinable elements used to classify content with the potential to be a landmark classification system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Knowledge organization systems (KOS) for government information facilitate access, management and dissemination of information produced with government funding. Supported by taxpayers, the information product is a public good with potential impact on the economy, and ready access to it extends its value. Determining the economic value of KOS in the government setting is complicated by the idea of return on investment, given the drive for free and open public access and difficulty identifying a presumed economic benefit and beneficiaries. Intellectual property use and technology transfer based on government information fuel industries and economic markets, demonstrating the value of the information, while the systems for organizing that information promote easy access and rapid dissemination. KOS are critical tools that expand paths to government information, opening a broader range of topics for wider audiences, providing semantic resources to enrich information and promote discovery and machine readable metadata to support automated processes and interoperability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

It is normal to organize our world, but doing so systematically is key and the subject of the book The Discipline of Organizing (TDO). The driving concept is that, while organization of resources is fundamental to library and information science, it is a central issue for many professional fields employing different organizational strategies and descriptive vernacular. To bring the diverse perspectives together, a broadly applicable, abstract framework can be used, based on an assessment of what is being organized, why, how much, when and by what means. These points of analysis of the resources to be organized inform organizational design decisions, considerations of stakeholders and costs and strategic planning for tools and methods. Principles underlying an organization system's design may draw on frequency of resource use or coordination of items, alphabetic or chronological ordering or unique approaches to manage hybrid and novel resources. The TDO philosophy reflects an information management approach that spans disciplinary silos and avoids field-limited terminology, while building the critical skills of resource organization and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

EDITOR'S SUMMARY Special Interest Group/Classification Research (SIG/CR) explored the significance of studies on classification and its real world effects through paper presentations by students and faculty at the 2015 ASIS&T Annual Meeting workshop. Presenters looked at the effects of approaches to classifying and structuring knowledge and at the ways classification models frame similarities and differences and influence views of society and the world. Among the papers on specific models and cases were presentations on capturing situation semantics in metadata, classifications of violence and disasters and historians' perspectives on organizing information. Fundamental philosophical positions were shown to inform classifications, and the effects of classificatory systems evolve with time. Other papers addressed the cultural, political and theoretical consequences of compiling a controlled vocabulary, outsourcing metadata and information resources for classification of social and cultural issues. The workshop ended with the announcement of new officers and presentation of student scholarships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

The special section of this ASIS&T Bulletin addresses the economic value of knowledge organization systems (KOS), including taxonomies and metadata. Denise Bedford notes that the value of taxonomies is not universally recognized and discusses their economic characteristics as well as some potential liabilities. Gail Hodge focuses on the economics and value of government-funded information as it affects the economics of KOS, considering open access and the public good as well as public concern for return on investment. Jane Greenberg targets metadata as capital, a valued asset or commodity. She poses the challenge of gathering empirical evidence to quantify the value of metadata. Taxonomist Barbara Gilles indulges in a thought experiment by digging into an analogy between data mining and mineral mining. As a professor of economics, Rick Szostak notes the ubiquity of knowledge organization systems despite the lack of understanding of their importance. Szostak proposes a synthetic approach to KOS by combining terms for fuller concept expression and muses that KOS may achieve the importance of Cutter's and Dewey's knowledge classification systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...