The teaching of KO in Higher Education DOES IT DO THE JOB? ROLES, SKILLS, FUTURE Sylvie Davies Robert Gordon University 14 th March

Sources  CILIP - Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB)  M. Hudon (2010; 2011)  Knowledge Organisation Competence Self-Assessment (2015)  KO competence framework (2016)  L. Robinson and D. Bawden (2010)  J. Morgan and D. Bawden (2006) 2

CILIP Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB) 3 16 HE departments accredited by CILIP Only 6 provide KO working knowledge

KO competence framework (2016) IKO - Singapore 4 KOS projectsUser analysis Content analysis Managing systems Developing KO structures & frameworks

Course objectives It is significant to note the rarity of objectives focusing on subject analysis (as a cognitive process) or on the use of technology, as if instructors believed that these skills were acquired by instinct or osmosis rather than by actual learning and practice. Hudon, understanding appreciation awareness evaluate be confident

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How is KO expressed in IM/ILS courses? 7

What to make of these representations?  KO is multi-disciplinary, even inter-disciplinary  Difficult to identify the driving discipline(s)  Difficult to identify core element(s)  Confusion between KO systems and their field of applications (metadata, interlinked data, digital libraries, visualization etc…) 8

The problem with multi-disciplinarity …in the design of courses 9 Multi-disciplinarityIntegrationInvisibility Multi-disciplinarityScattering Visibility out of IM context

Interactions with IT  As in integral tools (IR systems)  As complementary tools (thesaurus management systems, databases)  As learning tools (Elearning, WebDewey) 10

Students – mostly postgraduates  Varied academic and professional backgrounds  mainly from art/humanities and social sciences  They tend to join generic courses  Digital natives – a challenge?  Students are aware of need to organise information formally But…  They don’t seem to embrace IT  They struggle with terminology 11

Theory versus Practice  Education versus training  10 years ago theory was highly valued by academic AND employers (Morgan and Bawden, 2006)  And today?  Initiation to real world of work via:  Scenario in assessment  Case-studies  Placement  Visiting speakers 12

Options  ‘Spread’ KO in a landscape of diverse applications  Enhance visibility of KO  Neglect of core skills?  Focus on the core skills ‘the discipline of organizing’ (J.GlushKo)  Subject/domain analysis  Vocabulary control  Structural work transferrable skills ? 13

Subject/Domain Analysis - Challenges  Ability to work at conceptual level  between abstraction of the work and the specific single item  ‘attachment’ to format  Loss of expressivity in language  acronyms  abbreviations  usage of nouns at the expense of syntax  compound expressions 14

Vocabulary control - challenges  Poor knowledge of language as a tool of expression  at the lexical level  at the syntactical level  The problem of naming  concepts  relationships  distinction between names and identifiers 15

Structural Work - challenges  Logical reasoning  ‘is a test’  Consistency in building hierarchies  Consistency in applying principles of division  Ordering versus clustering  Graph theory 16

Points of discussion  How to handle multi-disciplinarity?  Should we re-define KO?  Should we focus on core skills?  How much IT?  Should CILIP re-consider criteria of accreditation?  Others? 17

References Glushko, R.J., ed. 2013, The discipline of organizing. MIT Press Hudon, M Teaching classification, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 48 (1) pp Morgan J., Bawden D., Teaching knowledge organization: educator, employer and professional association perspectives. Journal of Information Science. 32(2) pp Moore, M. and Tall, K., Building competence for knowledge organisation Thomson Reuters 30 OLC 27 Robinson, L., Bawden, D., Information (and library) science at City University London; 50 years of educational development. Journal of Information Science. 36(5), pp Pattuelli, M.C., Knowledge organization landscape: a content analysis of introductory courses. Journal of Information Science. 36(6) pp