This paper examines the role of library knowledge organization practices in supporting the social role of the public library through a discussion of the formation of the Dewey Decimal and Soviet Library-Bibliographic classifications. I show that in spite of significant differences in the ideologies motivating the ontological design of the classifications themselves, the methods and motivations behind creating such classifications were very similar, whether the location was late nineteenth century America or early twentieth century Soviet Russia. Both classifications are highly instructive as snapshots of thinking contemporary to their creation, and in the Soviet Union, library classification was construed as one more layer in the process of information control and indoctrination in Marxism-Leninism. Such a role was possible for these classifications because they were conceived of and first spread in a modern world, where the idea of a single and knowable truth was both acceptable and a worthy goal to pursue. The advent of postmodernism, with its emphasis on questioning monolithic myths, systems or ‘truths,’ has changed that attitude, and the advent of the Internet, search filters and personalized information has removed the library’s former monopoly as the only real purveyor of information available to the general public. In a world where uniting myths are neither needed nor wanted and information is at most of our fingertips, what role can the classification play? How can a modern classification organize a postmodern world? / text

published_or_final_version / Biological Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Ecology and Biodiversity / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

This paper analyzes the tagging patterns exhibited by users of del.icio.us, to assess how collaborative tagging supports and enhances traditional ways of classifying and indexing documents. Using frequency data and co-word analysis matrices analyzed by multi-dimensional scaling, the authors discovered that tagging practices to some extent work in ways that are continuous with conventional indexing. Small numbers of tags tend to emerge by unspoken consensus, and inconsistencies follow several predictable patterns that can easily be anticipated. However, the tags also indicated intriguing practices relating to time and task which suggest the presence of an extra dimension in classification and organization, a dimension which conventional systems are unable to facilitate.

As students advance to higher grade levels, they learn new words. The documents intended for upper grade levels will contain more advanced vocabularies, reflecting the assumed aptitude level of the intended audience. In this study, we first classified all the words in a pre-labeled document collection into various grade level categories. We then calculated the distribution of words from each grade level for all the documents. The eventual goal of our study is to build a system that automatically assigns the appropriate grade level label to each document in the NSDL repository. This will allow the educators to search more easily for material appropriate to specific audiences. The available dataset for this study comes from the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. This dataset contains a total of 8,417 documents with labels specifying the intended grade levels.

In information science, the creation of classification schemes has been more commonly described in the mode of scientific discovery, as opposed to artifact design. From the literary warrant of Hulme to the terminological warrant of the Classification Research Group (CRG), to Hjorlandâ s domain analysis, the classificationist seems like one who documents and compiles, and not one who actively shapes design. Outside of information science, however, classification is used as an active argument to structure interpretations (in linguistics and philosophy) and as a means of coordinating and imposing order on work practices (in studies of information systems). In this paper, I suggest that classification researchers should investigate a wider variety of design possibilities, in which the purpose of a classification is not assumed to be a retrieval tool in the traditional manner. A consequence of an expanded design space is that standard classification manuals and guides become insufficient support for the design process; a new research area might be the facilitation of problem-setting aspects of classification design. One avenue of possible research involves the description of a design language, following the description of such by Lowgren and Stolterman (2004) and Donald Schon (1983). A design language, which might be operationalized as a set of product qualities, might provide a framework by which designers can better understand, evaluate, and create classifications.

NISO, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation. NISO Standards, information about NISOâ s activities and membership are featured on the NISO website <http://www.niso.org>.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / An automatic indexing and concept classification approach to a multilingual (Chinese and English) bibliographic database is presented. We introduced a multi-linear termphrasing technique to extract concept descriptors (terms or keywords) from a Chinese-English bibliographic database. A concept space of related descriptors was then generated using a co-occurrence analysis technique. Like a man-made thesaurus, the system-generated concept space can be used to generate additional semantically-relevant terms for search. For concept classification and clustering, a variant of a Hopfield neural network was developed to cluster similar concept descriptors and to generate a small number of concept groups to represent (summarize) the subject matter of the database. The concept space approach to information classification and retrieval has been adopted by the aupors in other scientific databases and business applications, but multilingual information retrieval presents a unique challenge. This research reports our experiment on multilingual databases. Our system was initially developed in the MS-DOS environment, running ETEN Chinese operating system. For performance reasons, it was then tested on a UNIX-based system. Due to the unique ideographic nature of the Chinese language, a Chinese term-phrase indexing paradigm considering the ideographic characteristics of Chinese was developed as a multilingual information classification model. By applying the neural network based concept classification technique, the model presents a novel way of organizing unstructured multilingual information.

Recent work in automatic question answering has called for question taxonomies as a critical component of the process of machine understanding of questions. There is a long tradition of classifying questions in library reference services, and digital reference services have a strong need for automation to support scalability. Digital reference and question answering systems have the potential to arrive at a highly fruitful symbiosis. To move towards this goal, an extensive review was conducted of bodies of literature from several fields that deal with questions, to identify question taxonomies that exist in these bodies of literature. In the course of this review, five question taxonomies were identified, at four levels of linguistic analysis.