On October 26, 2012, Access Innovations, Inc. president Marjorie M.K. Hlava presented an afternoon keynote speech at the 23rd Annual SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, part of the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s 75th annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.
Titled Tales from the Field: Implementing Information Technology, the presentation emphasized directions in the field now and in the future. Highlights of adventures in creating and delivering databases and taxonomies over the last 35 years were part of the slideshow address. Hlava explained the challenges facing those projects, including natural disasters, poor OCR, Vatican bibles, technology changes, and the mistrust of former Soviet government agencies, and examined how the company worked to overcome those challenges.
The presentation underscored the future with an overview of the history of knowledge theory, focusing on the role of classification. The rapid change of the last half century, with its explosion of media, data formats, and indexing techniques, has led to a confusing present. The future, Hlava said, will be a chaotic mess unless information specialists contain it.
About ASIS&T – www.asis.org
The mission of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is to advance the information sciences and related applications of information technology by providing focus, opportunity, and support to information professionals and organizations.
About SIG/CR – www.asis.org/SIG/cr
ASIS&T’s Classification Research Special Interest Group (SIG/CR) studies the fundamental principles, underlying processes, and analytic constructs of classification schemes and procedures by humans or automata. It is concerned with organizing information, and includes indexing, index construction, indexing language, thesaurus construction, terminology, classification of information in any form, and testing and evaluating the effectiveness of these products. It is also concerned with the ability to develop abstractions from perceived reality. Theoretical emphases include cognition, grouping and organization of groupings, and linguistics.
