Knowledge Organization and Classification in International Information Retrieval, edited by Nancy J. Williamson and Clare Beghtol

Knowledge Organization and Classification in International Information Retrieval. Edited by Nancy J. Williamson and Clare Beghtol. New York: Haworth Information Press, 2003. 244 pp. softcover ISBN 0789023555 (also published as Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 37, 1/2)

In the current networked environment, libraries are increasingly interested in an international approach to managing information.  This book addresses knowledge organization from an international perspective, with its authors coming from six countries.  It is a fascinating collection of current research on classification and knowledge organization that should be consulted by librarians interested in these topics.

The editors, Nancy Williamson and Clare Beghtol, both Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, organized the book into four sections, the first of which, “General Bibliographic Systems,” is closest to the work that librarians regularly perform.  Jens-Erik Mai, in “The Future of General Classification,” addresses issues such as interoperability and special versus general classification schemes.  In “Adapting Dominant Classifications to Particular Contexts,” Angela Kublik et al. discuss a project in which topics represented unsatisfactorily in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) were reassigned to more appropriate and/or expanded numbers.  A fascinating research project was described by Barbara Kwaśnik and Victoria Rubin in “Stretching Conceptual Structures in Classifications Across Languages and Cultures.”  In this project, they compared terms for family relationships across multiple languages and cultures, and found that many terms in one language or culture do not correlate specifically to terms in others and are represented quite differently in DDC and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC), illustrating the difficulties that librarians will face as we try to develop international approaches to classification and subject analysis.  In the final chapter in this section, Victoria Frâncu addressed “The Impact of Specificity on the Retrieval Power of a UDC-Based Multilingual Thesaurus,” presenting the results of a study that illustrated the usefulness of multilingual descriptors mapped to Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) numbers.

The second section of the book is titled “Information Organization in Knowledge Resources” and contains four chapters, the most interesting of which is “Expanding Audiences for Education-Related Information and Resources: Classificatory Structures on the World Wide Web,” by Michèle Hudon.  In this stimulating paper, Hudon presents the results of an investigation into how education-related resources are represented in Yahoo!, AltaVista, Open Directory Project/Google, and Librarians’ Index to the Internet and compares the results to the hierarchies present in LCC and DDC.

“Linguistics, Terminology, and Natural Language Processing” is the topic of the third section of the book which will be of interest to many readers.  In “Designing a Common Namespace for Searching Metadata-Enabled Knowledge Repositories: An International Perspective,” Lynne C. Howarth presents the results of a study that illustrate the difficulty of creating a gateway between knowledge repositories.

Finally, the third section of the book, “Knowledge in the World and the World of Knowledge” presents three chapters, the third of which might be of most interest to librarians.  D. Grant Campbell, in “Global Abstractions: The Classification of International Economic Data for Bibliographic and Statistical Purposes” compares and contrasts information about agriculture in LCC and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).  As NAICS is being adopted by increasing numbers of countries to classify statistical data, this comparison is useful and interesting.

Overall, this collection is a stimulating and exciting look at issues of knowledge organization and classification from an international perspective.  It will be a useful addition to professional libraries that do not already subscribe to Cataloging & Classification Quarterly.