Outline of the objectives of the module:
This module aims to enable students to apply, develop and evaluate systems and processes for organising knowledge in a broad perspective. Students will be prepared to utilize relevant knowledge from information science as well as from other disciplines. The module provides students with cross-disciplinary competences in knowledge organization including perspectives from philosophy of science, sociology of science and linguistics. These competences serve as a basis for students to apply, design and evaluate systems and processes for organising knowledge in their future careers.
Contents:
Knowledge organisation in a narrow sense cover processes such as document representation, classification, indexing, metadata design, thesaurus development, etc. that serve to optimise the retrieval of documents or information. Knowledge organisation in a broader sense is understood as the intellectual division of labour, the social and cognitive organisation of scientific disciplines, the distribution of work among the various media and information systems, subjects/domains, terminologies and vocabularies and different theoretical traditions and schools of thought.
In libraries, knowledge organisation has traditionally been performed as a process where the user has been dependent on the system that the library decided to make available, why the relations between the narrow and the broad form of knowledge organisation have been slight or delicate. The new open environment with the libraries’ subject-related resource surrogates are increasingly competing with other information sources (including the documents themselves in full-text versions), greatly emphasises the need for strengthening the study of the broad perspective of knowledge organization so that information services, to a greater extent, can operate on the users’ conditions. The perspective underlying the module concerned with knowledge organisation is cross-disciplinary, based, among other things, on sociological, bibliometric, linguistic and philosophy of science-related investigations and theories. Recent computer technology related perspectives (including, among other things, ontologies, semantic networks and HTML codes) are included as well.
Modes of teaching and learning:
Lectures, seminars, presentations as well as cases allowing students the possibility of choosing to work with knowledge organisation from a domain-specific focus (for instance, social sciences, music, etc.).