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The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the selected Proceedings of the 1st National Conference of ISKO UK, the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization. It aims to provide some background for the group, and place it within the context of the recent history of information organization and retrieval in subject domains.

The paper introduces a selection of papers delivered at the 1st National Conference of the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization.

The field of knowledge organization is lively and progressive, and researchers and practitioners in many sectors are actively engaged with it, despite its apparent decline in LIS education. New communities of interest may use different terms to describe this work, but there is much common ground, and a growing convergence of ideas and methods.

The value of existing theory is now more widely recognised, and the importance of structured knowledge organization systems and vocabularies in retrieval is generally acknowledged. It is to be hoped that these important areas of information practice and research will soon be restored to their former place in professional education.

The purpose of the research reported here is to improve comprehension of the socially‐negotiated identity of concepts in the domain of knowledge organization. Because knowledge organization as a domain has as its focus the order of concepts, both from a theoretical perspective and from an applied perspective, it is important to understand how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept.

The paper provides an empirical demonstration of how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept. The paper employs content analysis to demonstrate the ways in which concepts are portrayed in KO concept maps as signs, and they are subjected to evaluative semiotic analysis as a way to understand their meaning. The frame was the entire population of formal proceedings in knowledge organization – all proceedings of the International Society for Knowledge Organization's international conferences (1990‐2010) and those of the annual classification workshops of the Special Interest Group for Classification Research of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (SIG/CR).

A total of 344 concept maps were analyzed. There was no discernible chronological pattern. Most concept maps were created by authors who were professors from the USA, Germany, France, or Canada. Roughly half were judged to contain semiotic content. Peirceian semiotics predominated, and tended to convey greater granularity and complexity in conceptual terminology. Nodes could be identified as anchors of conceptual clusters in the domain; the arcs were identifiable as verbal relationship indicators. Saussurian concept maps were more applied than theoretical; Peirceian concept maps had more theoretical content.

The paper demonstrates important empirical evidence about the coherence of the domain of knowledge organization. Core values are conveyed across time through the concept maps in this population of conference papers.

The purpose of this chapter is to characterize knowledge organization (KO) as a field that is affected by geographic and diachronic variations in such a way that the recognition of a slanted KO could be considered an ethical option in the KO theory and practice. KO can be considered a dynamic social product that reflects a construction that is altered in space and time. Slants are inherent to any organization of knowledge and are manifested in multiple dimensions. There is a need to find a balance between the respect for the local specificities and the necessity of global access to information. Conceptual and terminological time and space slants in KO are presented. Examples of possible day-by-day searches are analyzed in order to evidence the different cultures that are involved in the different social-linguistic characteristics. The recognition of time and space as operational axes for an ethical approach to a slanted KO is important because: (a) it tries to intervene in represented and possibly disseminated biases that are practiced so far; (b) it recognizes the coexistence of diverse groups and communities, with local characteristics, meanings, and idiosyncrasies, that will need to communicate with each other in global information systems of information; and (c) it can promote an intercultural ethics of mediation, culturally warranted, in order to avoid cultural damages and to guarantee that descriptions can reflect the past while keeping an eye in the future, based on KOS whose functionality remains over time.

The conditions that domain analysis becomes an academic school of information science (IS) are mature. Domain analysis is one of the most important foundations of IS. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss metatheoretical and theoretical issues in the domain analytic paradigm in IS.

This paper conducts a systematic review of representative publications of domain analysis. The analysis considered degree theses, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and other materials.

Domain analysis maintains that community is the new focus of IS research. Although domain analysis centers on the domain and community, theoretical concerns on the social and individual dimensions of IS are inherent in it by its using sociology as its important approach and socio-cognitive viewpoint. For these reasons domain analysis can integrate social–community–individual levels of IS discipline as a whole. The role of subject knowledge in IS is discussed from the perspective of domain analysis. Realistic pragmatism that forms the philosophical foundation of domain analysis is argued and the implications of these theories to IS are presented.

The intellectual evolving landscape of domain analysis during a quarter century is comprehensively reviewed. Over the past twenty-five years, domain analysis has established its academic status in the international IS circle. Being an important metatheory, paradigm and methodology, domain analysis becomes the theoretical foundation of IS research. This paper assesses the current state of domain analysis and shows the contributions of domain analysis to IS. It also aims to inspire further exploration.

Knowledge organization (KO) has been advancing at a progressively rapid pace under the influence of information technology. This study aims to explore the topics, characteristics, and trends of KO research in the 21st century.

The full text of 4,360 KO-related articles published from 2000 to 2021 is collected. Through content analysis, this study identifies the topics, research methods, and application areas of each article, and the statistics are presented through a series of visualizations.

In total, 13 main topics, 105 sub-topics, 16 research methods, and 57 application areas are identified. Notably, classification has always been an important topic, while linked data, automated techniques, and ontology have become popular topics recently. Significant changing features have also occurred. The versatile use of research methods has increased, with empirical research becoming the mainstream. Application areas show a trend of refinement from subject areas to specific scenarios. Construction techniques present a combination of automated techniques, crowdsourcing, and experts.

KO has evolved and diversified due to technological developments. This study is the first to focus on the continuous changing features over an extended, 21-year period, as opposed to sampling a few years. It also provides clues and insights for researchers and practitioners interested in KO to understand how it has changed in the Semantic Web and big data context.

Purpose — This chapter describes how incoherent government policies implemented in the first two decades (1970–1990) following the official recognition of Information science (IS) as an academic discipline within the broader interdiscipline of Information and Communication Sciences (ICS), shaped the current landscape of IS in France. This led to a narrow conception of IS often reduced to a technical specialty solving the problem of information explosion by setting up bibliographic databases, document indexing and delivery services.

Design/methodology/approach — The approach is historical and comparative. The author relies on earlier accounts by previous French authors and performs a comparison with the situation of IS in Anglophone countries (United States mostly).

Findings — The historical narrow conception of IS is now outdated. IS neither plays the role of gatekeeper anymore to scientific and technical information nor to information access since the generalisation of Internet search engines. Its scientific community in France lacks identity and is fast dwindling. Also, its problematics are not properly identified.

Research limitations/implications — Field work involving interviews of French figures and archival research could not be carried out in the limited time and means available. This needs to be done in the future.

Practical implications — This chapter should stimulate more comparative approach on the way Library & Information Science (LIS) is structured in other countries. Although the French situation appears unique in that IS is embedded within an interdiscipline (ICS) and does not exist autonomously, other similarities could be found in other countries where IS has had a similar trajectory and lessons could be learned.

Social implications — This chapter may serve as a stepping stone for future research on the historical foundations and epistemology of IS in France and elsewhere. It should also help disseminate to the LIS community at large how the French IS landscape has been evolving, since most French scholars publish in French, language has indeed been a barrier to disseminating their research worldwide.

Originality/value — There has not been a recent and comprehensive study which has looked at the peculiarities of the French IS landscape but also at the commonalities it shares with the situation of IS in other countries with respect to how the field originated and how it has evolved.

This article examines the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which is the most used subject heading system in the world and an instance of a controlled vocabulary (CV).

The method used to examine the system is based on both authors’ subject knowledge in the field of information science (IS) and the subfield of knowledge organization (KO). Core concepts in this domain were examined (1) by checking if they are present or not in the system; (2) if not, by determining whether LCSH contains alternative terms useful for searching documents about the missing concept, by examining books indexed by the Library of Congress; (3) by identifying the semantic relations between subject headings.

The results demonstrate fundamental problems in the logical consistency of the representation of IS and KO in LCSH.

The implications for CVs in general are discussed.

No previous study has used our method to examine LCSH’s coverage of IS.