Fifteenth International ISKO Conference, July 9-11, 2018, Porto, Portugal

by Dr Debbie Lee, City, University of London

I was very grateful to receive the ISKO UK doctoral student bursary to support my attendance at the ISKO conference in Porto in July 2018. It was an inspiring and intense three-and-a-half days. I came away from the conference having enhanced my knowledge about the latest developments in KO research, as well gaining ideas of new directions for my research and with additions to my want-to-read pile. I also had the opportunity to meet or renew discussions with many researchers in a variety of areas of KO, and these discussions will inform my future research and teaching. The opportunity to meet other early career researchers was very beneficial, which was possible thanks to the generosity of ISKO UK. I will now share my thoughts about selected specific papers and workshops from the conference, which I found especially though-provoking or relevant to my research and teaching.

A key theme which emerged from the conference was a reflection on the relationship between knowledge organization and other library and information science theory and practice. In his keynote address, David Bawden, set out the wider view of knowledge organization in the world. He asked whether a truth-based classification was possible. This set the scene nicely for other papers at the conference which discussed truth and ethics – for example, those by Jonathan Furner and Elliott Hauser. David Bawden positioned the idea of curating the infosphere as a major part of the information profession, and he suggested that KO has a huge role to play in this. I perceive this to mean that instead of KO sitting in a discrete corner of the practice and theory of library and information science, while the current work on truth and information sits in another, in future the two somewhat distinct areas of LIS become conjoined.

Rick Szostak's paper on "applied knowledge organization" and world history approached the idea of KO reaching outwards in a different way. He talked about his research in and textbook of world history, which uses KO not only to organise the materials, but also to understand and demonstrate the links across different histories. Rick Szostak's fascinating account of this research showed how he used visualisations of KO in the form of flowcharts to provide a new way of thinking about KO. He suggested that this type of approach makes KO more explicit. I found this paper particularly fascinating as it mixes together pedagogy, teaching for understanding, advancing scholarly knowledge and knowledge organization. So, Rick Szostak's work sees KO helping to advance knowledge in a field outside of library and information science; however, the focus is not through building a traditional KOS per se, but instead, knowledge is advanced through the theory of classification. I am really looking forward to seeing the end results of Rick Szostak's research, and I hope these ideas can be incorporated into my own KO research into music classification.

The conference was also a chance to think about current key research questions. If selecting a word of the conference, I would plump for "epistemic" – broadly speaking, meaning relating to knowledge or knowing. This concept was a focus of a number of the conference's papers. Jonathan Furner's paper on truth, relevance and justice, discussed the concept of epistemic justice in detail, positioning it at the centre of a Venn diagram which contains ethics, epistemology and social theory. One of Jonathan Furner's examples of epistemic injustice in KO looked at the treatment of religion in DDC, as illuminated by the number of people following different religions in the world not being represented by DDC's distribution of class numbers. Epistemic loci were the focal point for a paper by Tatiana Almeida and Gustavo Silva Saldanha, which considered metamethology in relation to KO. These papers highlighted to me the closeness between theories of knowledge and theories of knowledge organization.

As a researcher in music classification including faceted classifications of music, it was really useful to hear papers which were directly related to my research area. Of particular interest was the paper by Camila Monteiro de Barros, Lígia Maria Arruda Café and Audrey Laplante. This paper examined semiotics for music classification, and in particular, the role of emotion in classifying music. I found it a fascinating direction in music classification research. Michèle Hudon and Alexandre Fortier unpicked the possible means and purposes of facets, asking whether a single facet could in fact have different meanings.

Dianne Rasmussen Pennington and Laura Cagnazzo's spoke about linked data use and knowledge in libraries. Their paper advocated for taking linked data projects for libraries out of silos and thinking more carefully about joining linked data initiatives together. As a practicing librarian, this research was particularly useful, as it was an informed and analytical account of the actual state of play with linked data and libraries.

As well as papers, the conference featured a number of panels and workshops. There was a panel in memorial to Ingetraut Dahlberg. This started with accounts of her life and work, including descriptions of her Desiderata for classification, the foundation of the international coding classification (inspired by her work) and her founding of ISKO. This was followed by a review of some of the most important concepts to her work, by experts in these areas. The session illustrated the enormous contributions that Ingetraut Dahlberg made to the field of KO. I also found the panel on ISKO publications fascinating. Richard Smiraglia spoke about the journal Knowledge Organization, and Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli gave a detailed account of the ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization (IEKO). As a lecturer who has found the IEKO a very useful tool for teaching, it was really interesting to hear a formal account of its founding, organisation and structure.

In conclusion, attending the ISKO 2018 conference in Porto was extremely interesting and will be beneficial to many aspects of my research, teaching and professional work.

If any of these thoughts have piqued your interest in reading the full papers, the conference proceedings are published by Ergon Verlag, edited by Fernanda Ribeiro and Maria Elisa Cerveira, as part of the "Advances in Knowledge Organization" series.