3_UNITS in KO

Information, knowledge, documents, works, genres, concepts etc. as the units being organized

Why try to define the units? What difference does it make to you?

Well, logically, it should be evident to try to define what we are talking about.

Are terms like information, knowledge, documents, works, genres, concepts to be regarded as synonyms with regard to KO or are they different concepts?

Educational goal: to be able to say something well argued about the difficult concepts like "information", "knowledge" and "work" - this is expected by somebody educated in "Library and Information Science"

Connect such concepts with specific practical consequences such as the use of the concept of work in FRBR.

Connect these concepts with the broader theoretical perspectives in (L)IS (to be introduced later in this course, but to be anticipated now). It also points to broader interdisciplinary perspectives, e.g. how elements of knowledge is understood in the philosophy of science.

How to define terms is in itself a theoretical problem for which there are different answers. My best answer to this is informed by the pragmatic philosophers. The exercise to try to define the terms is thus ALSO an exercise in general terminological clarification. 

The literature about concepts such as "information" and "knowledge" is immense and - unfortunately very muddled. This is a professional problem for all of us. We have to spend much time, that is not spend very well if we do not reach clarity. We need to develop criteria for what counts as contributions - what brings us forward and what is only waste of time? (You should of course use all resources available: your own common sense, your teachers, your fellow students, the printed literature etc to bring clarification rather than confusion).

Some uses of terminology is serious. (All uses ought to be serious!). Sometimes, however, are terms (e.g. information) selected in order "to help raise the status of a dusty library profession", as Spang-Hanssen (1970/2001, p. 1) wrote.

Spang-Hanssen, H. (1970). How to Teach About Information as Related to Documentation? (unpublished speech; published  2001). http://www.hb.se/bhs/ith/1-01/hsh.htm

Historically "knowledge organization" was established by Charles A. Cutter, W. C. Berwick Sayers, Ernest Cushington Richardson and Henry Bliss who argued that book classification is based on knowledge organization such as it appears in science and scholarship. The origin of the term ”Knowledge Organization” is clearly related to their work, according to which book classification fundamentally is knowledge classification and this is again relying on knowledge production for which books are the tangible expression.

Today it is often unclear whether, for example "knowledge representation" should be regarded as the same as KO