Wednesday 14 November 2007

Ranganathan revisited: Facets for the future

ISKOUK held its second KOKO (KOnnecting KOmmunities) event from 14:00 - 20:00 on November 5th. 2007 entitled Ranganathan Revisited: Facets for the future . The intention was to explore the current status of faceted classification from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. The event was sponsored by Factiva from Dow Jones and the venue was provided by the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London UCL). Eighty-one people attended.

S. R. Ranganathan was the Indian librarian and academic who, in the 1930s, developed the theory of faceted classification. Faceted classification is an approach to presenting and organizing knowledge based on the identification of fundamental subject categories (‘facets') that allows the combination of relevant values from one or more facets to define a compound subject with great precision.

A report of the event is available for download from the ISKO UK web site. Copies of the presentations may be downloaded and MP3 recordings will also be available shortly.

2 comments:

CG said...

Bob, Conrad, and Aida:

thanks a lot for summarizing and documenting the event in such an accurate and multimedial way! I was plesed to read the summary of my talk , which was not easy to summarize...

Just one point: I obviously agree that notation is not user-friendly, nor it is supposed to be in classification. We discussed its technicalities just because we are not the final users. Final users have only to input verbal search terms (captions), and the system has to display the corresponding items, including their notation or not.

Still, notation plays a key role in the digital environment too, as a retrieving and ordering device. This is where bibliographic classification offers something more than taxonomies and thesauri.

In conclusion, though discussing its form for technical purposes, I am not worried that notation, in any form, be a problem for the final user, provided a good search interface is given (like in any IR system).

Cari saluti

CG said...
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