Madness and Method in the Organization of Knowledge - Professor Vanda Broughton (UCL DIS)

Inaugural Lecture - Professor Vanda Broughton Since the beginning of civilization how to organize recorded knowledge in libraries and personal book collections has been a matter of practical and intellectual concern. Many of the systems devised are idiosyncratic, or reflect world views which seem strange to the modern mind. Today there is still a proliferation of classifications, and their applications include not only books, but also ephemera, physical objects, e-resources, datasets, and the semantic web. However, there is more understanding of how we should go about designing systems on a proper scientific basis, and a body of theoretical work that gives academic credibility to the process. Vanda Broughton has been a researcher, professional practitioner, and academic in the field of knowledge organization. She is currently Editor of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification, and Associate Editor of the Universal Decimal Classification, two large systems for the classification and indexing of information. Her research is primarily in the development of faceted classification theory, and its application to the design and construction of controlled vocabularies in all subject fields.