Session I
Monday, October 28, 2:00-3:30PM
Organizing Information in Digital Libraries:
Classifying Digital Materials
David Levy
Xerox Parc
3333 Coyote Hill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
dlevy@parc.xerox.com
Geoffrey C. Bowker
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel
Champaign, IL 61820
bowker@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Marcia Bates
University of California, Los Angeles
mjbates@ucla.edu
[Notes from the session]
Currently there are a number of efforts to organize material on the
Web. These include automated classification (Oracle's ConText),
classification "by hand" (Yahoo!), and automated, full-text indexing (AltaVista).
Approaches vary in the extent to which they make use of knowledge
drawn from traditional library science, information science, and the social sciences. In this session, we will bring an explicitly human-centered approach to bear on the problem of classifying digital materials. We hope to touch on questions such as:
- What is classification? (It means different things in different
disciplines.)
- What is classification for? (It's for access, but also a lot more.)
- How relevant are existing schemes and techniques drawn from library
and information sciences? (Perhaps a focus on faceted classification
here?)
- In particular, how does starting from a human-centered perspective
alter the potential requirements for and methods of classification?
- How does "classification in the wild" (vernacular and ad-hoc classification) interact with formal, large-scale schemes embedded in information systems?
This is a tall order and we cannot expect to cover it in any depth in
our session, especially since we hope to make it a highly interactive hour
and a half. Our plan is to focus the session around certain examples from
the Web as well as examples and comments drawn from the background
reading.
Background reading:
David Levy, "Cataloguing in the Digital Order."
Susan Leigh Star, "Grounded Classification: Grounded Theory and
Faceted Classification."
Marcia Bates, Human, Database, and Domain Factors in Content Indexing and Access to Digital Libraries and the Internet
Last Updated: Jan. 15, 1997