screenshot of text
Bibliographic data and metadata, alongside their supporting appara-tuses, such as data fields, card catalogs, and controlled vocabularies,are important because of what they tell us and also because of whatthey do not. As Sarah Werner points out, the stakes in these descrip-tions are higher than just simple naming and labeling: the categoriesand classifications used in the description of material artifacts are notneutral, and “we cannot do the work that we need to do for the futureof bibliography if we cannot expand who [and what] is included in thatwork.”1 In a queer utopia, we would not assign labels to resources(bibliographic and otherwise) as we do currently. 2 We would be freefrom the assignation of others’ words to our worlds. I am thinkinghere of Library of Congress subject headings such as “Indian gays,”“Female impersonators,” “Gay men—Conduct of life,” and “Sexualminorities.” Yet, until a truly queer world exists (or in lieu thereof ),we need to find ways of ar
screenshot:
Knowledge Organization (KO) is an academic field mostly associatedwith library and information science (LIS).3 Knowledge is organized sothat it may be used, and the field studies the description, organization,and representation of “information resources” by humans and comput-ers. These resources include letters in archives, artwork in museums,and, of course, books in libraries. Unlike many other disciplines, thereis significant overlap between the academic field and its professionalpractitioners, who often also identify as catalogers, classificationists,taxonomists, or metadata workers. Typically, KO research falls intotwo broad areas, focusing either on the processes of this work, suchas subject analysis, tagging, indexing, or cataloging methods, or onthe results of it, for example, classification systems, subject headings,thesauri, or metadata
I begin with a hat tip to @wynkenhimself.bsky.social (thrilled that I get to be on a panel with Sarah @ #QueerBibliography UCLA!) and then sketch out #KnowledgeOrganization as a field, linking it to infrastructure (nothing groundbreaking here).